Despite a history of ethnic, linguistic, and political fragmentation, the people of the Indian subcontinent are unified by a common cultural and ethical outlook; a wealth of ancient textual literature in Sanskrit, Prākrit, and regional languages is a major unifying factor. Music and dance, ritual customs, modes of worship, and literary ideals are similar throughout the subcontinent, even though the region has been divided into kaleidoscopic political patterns through the centuries.

The close interrelationship of the various peoples of South Asia may be traced in their epics, as in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. Kinship between the gods and heroes of regions far distant from each other is evident, and the place-names themselves often evoke common sources. Moreover, there have been continual attempts to impose a political unity over the region. In the 3rd century bc, for example, the emperor Aśoka had almost all of this region under his sway; in the 11th century ad, Rājendra I Cōḻa conquered almost the whole of India and a good portion of Southeast Asia; and the great Mughal Akbar again achieved this in the 16th century. Though the expansion and attenuation of boundary lines, the bringing together or pulling apart politically of whole regions, have characterized all of South Asian history, the culture has remained essentially one.

The geography of the region encouraged a common adoration of mountains and rivers. The great Himalayas, which form the northern boundary, are the loftiest of mountains and are conceived to be the embodiment of nobility, the abode of immaculate snow, and the symbol of a cultural ideal. Similarly, the great rivers such as the Brahmaputra and the Indus are regarded as the mothers of their respective regions, assuring prosperity through their perennial supply of water.

The association of lakes and springs with water sprites and sylvan fairies, called nāgas and yakṣas, is common throughout the region. Karkoṭa, the name of an early dynasty, itself signifies nāga worship in Kashmir. Sculptures of nāgas and yakṣas found in widespread sites suggest a common spirit of adoration, as do sculptures, paintings, temples, and religious texts that for centuries were preserved within an oral tradition without losing their immaculate intonation. The same classical dance is seen in sculpture in Gandhāra in Pakistan, in Bhārhut in the north, and in Amarāvatī in the south.

The relation of the various arts to each other is very close in South Asia, where proficiency in several arts is necessary for specialization in any one. Thus, it is believed that without a good knowledge of dance there can be no proficiency in sculpture, for dance, like painting or sculpture, is a depiction of all the world. For its rhythmic movements and exposition of emotion, dance also requires musical accompaniments; hence, knowledge of musical rhythm is essential. For the stirring of emotion either in music or in dance, knowledge of literature and rhetoric is believed to be necessary; the flavour (rasa) to be expressed in music, dance, sculpture, or painting requires a literary background. Thus all the arts are closely linked together.

The arts were cultivated in South Asia not only as a noble pastime but also in a spirit of dedication, as an offering to a god. Passages in literature refer to princes studying works of art for possible defects. One inscription that mentions the name of the sūtra-dhāra (“architect”) of the 8th-century Mallikārjuna temple at Pattadakal epitomizes the accomplishments and ideals, in both theory and practice, of the artist.

Artists traditionally have enjoyed a high position in South Asian societies. Poets, musicians, and dancers held honoured seats in the royal court. An inscription mentions the appreciation bestowed by Rājendra Cōḻa on a talented dancer, and the architect of the temple at Tiruvoṟṟiyūr, who was also patronized by Rājendra, was eulogized for his encyclopaedic knowledge of architecture and art. Nonetheless, the folk arts were closely linked with the elite arts. Tribal group dances, for example, shared common elements with classical art, dance, and music. Among the artistic traditions of the Indian subcontinent, sculpture in the round (citra) is considered the highest artistic expression of form, and sculpture in relief (ardhacitra) is next in importance. Painting (citrābhāsa, literally “the semblance of sculpture”) ranks third. Feeling for volume was so great that the effect of chiaroscuro (i.e., use of light and shade to indicate modelling) was considered very important in painting; a passage from a drama of the 5th-century poet Kālidāsa describes how the eye tumbles over the heights and depths suggested in the modelling of a painting. A classical text on art, Citrasūtra enumerates noteworthy factors in paintings: the line sketch, firmly and gracefully drawn, is considered the highest element by the masters; shading and depiction of modelling are valued by others; the decorative element appeals to feminine taste; and the splendour of colour appeals to common taste. The use of a minimum of drawing to produce the maximum effect in suggesting form is considered most admirable.

Portraits play an important role in the visual arts of South Asia, and there are many literary references to the effective depiction of portraits both in painting and in sculpture. A 6th-century text, the Viṣṇudharmottara, classifies portraiture into natural, lyrical, sophisticated, and mixed, and men and women are classified into types by varieties of hair—long and fine, curling to right, wavy, straight and flowing, curled and abundant; similarly, eyes may be bow-shaped, of the hue of the blue lotus, fishlike, lotus-petal-like, or globular. Artistic stances are enumerated, and principles of foreshortening are explained. Paintings or sculptures were believed to take after their creators, even as a poem reflects the poet.

Although South Asia has continually been subjected to strong outside influences, it has always incorporated them into native forms, resulting not in imitation but in a new synthesis. This may be seen even in the art of the Gandhāra region of Pakistan, which in the 4th century bc was immersed in Greco-Roman tradition. In the sculpture of this period Indian themes and modes have softened the Western style. Foreign influence is evident after the invasion of the Kushāns in the 1st century ad, but the native element predominated and overwhelmed the foreign influence. During the Mughal period, from the 16th century, when Muslims from Central Asia reigned in South Asia, the blend of Iranian and Indian elements produced a predominantly Indian school that spread throughout the region, making it a unified cultural area under imperial rule. The influence of Islāmic art was enhanced by the second Mughal emperor, Humāyūn, who imported painters from the court of the Shāh of Persia and began a tradition that blended Indian and Persian elements to produce an efflorescence of painting and architecture.

Art in all these regions reflects a system of government, a set of moral and ethical attitudes, and social patterns. The desire of kings to serve the people and to take care of them almost as offspring is evident as early as the 3rd century bc. The ideal of the king as the unrivalled bowman, the unifier, the tall and stately noble spirit, the sacrificer for the welfare of the subjects, and the hero of his people (who conceive of him on a stately elephant) is comprehensively illustrated in a magnificent series of coins from the Gupta Empire of North India of the 4th–6th centuries. The concepts of righteous conquest and righteous warfare are illustrated in sculpture. The long series of sculptures illustrating the history of the South Indian Pallava dynasty of the 4th–9th centuries gives an excellent picture of the various activities of government—such as war and conquests, symbolic horse sacrifices, the king’s council, diplomatic receptions, peace negotiations, the building of temples, appreciation of the fine arts (including dance and music), and the coronation of kings—all clearly demonstrating what an orderly government meant to the people. Similarly, moral attitudes are illustrated in sculptures that lay stress on dharma—customs or laws governing duty. The doctrine of ahiṃsā, or noninjury to others, is often conceived symbolically as a deer, and the ideal of a holy place is represented as a place where the deer roams freely. The joy in giving and renunciation is clearly indicated in art. Sculptures illustrate simple and effective stories, as from the Pañca-tantra, one of the oldest books of fables in the world. The spirit of devotion, faith, and respect for moral standards that has throughout the centuries pervaded the subcontinent’s social structure is continuously represented in South Asian painting and sculpture.

The peoples of South Asia have had a continuous literature from the first appearance in the Punjab of a branch of the Indo-European-speaking peoples who also settled all of Europe and Iran. In India this branch of Indo-Aryans, as they are usually called, met earlier inhabitants with different languages and no doubt a different culture—possibly a culture akin to that of the Indus Valley civilization, which had a script, and perhaps a literature of its own, of which nothing is known. Certain to have been settled in India were peoples who spoke languages of Dravidian origin, as well as other languages, called Munda, now preserved only by aboriginal tribes, which show affinities with the languages of Southeast Asia.

The earliest literature is of a sacred character and dates from about 1400 bc in the form of the Rigveda. This work stands at the beginning of the literature of the Veda, or canonical Hindu sacred writings, which as a whole is roughly contemporary with the settlement of the Indo-Aryan peoples in the Punjab and farther east, in the mesopotamia of the Ganges and Yamunā rivers. The language of the Rigveda, which is a compilation of hymns to the high gods of the Aryan religion, is complex and archaic. It was simplified and codified in the course of the centuries from 1000 to 500 bc, which saw the development of prose commentaries called the Brāhmaṇas, Āraṇyakas, and Upaniṣads. While there must have been a long tradition of grammarians, the final codification of the language is ascribed to Pāṇini (5th or 6th century bc), whose grammar has remained normative for the correct language ever since. This language is called Sanskrit (Tongue Perfected). Sanskrit has had a scarcely interrupted literature from about 600 bc until today, but its greatest efflorescence was in the classical period, from the 1st to 7th centuries ad. Because it was identified with the Brahminical religion of the Vedas, reform movements such as Buddhism and Jainismdisdained the use of Sanskrit and adopted literary languages—amalgams of different dialects of the parent language—of their own, Pāli in Buddhism and Ardhamāgadhī in Jainism. These languages, usually called Prākrits—that is, derivative as well as more “natural” languages—produced a vast and, again, mostly sacred literature. In a further development of these dialects, the early beginnings can be seen of modern Indo-Aryan languages of northern India: Bengali (also the language of Bangladesh), Hindi (the official language of the Republic of India since 1947), Rajasthani, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kashmiri, Oriya, Assamese, and Sindhi, each of which produced a literature of its own. Their names are derived from the regions in which they are spoken, regions with uncertain boundaries, where the different dialects fused at the borders. They all retained a close family resemblance that made bilingualism easy and a fact of Indian literary life.

Far more marked was the difference between Indo-Aryan speech and the languages of the Dravidian family, which are structurally wholly different, though in time a measure of convergence took place. Among them, the oldest recorded is Tamil, now the language of Tamil Nadu (Madras) state and of northern Sri Lanka, whose literature goes back to the early centuries of the Christian Era. Later to be put to literary uses were the cognate Telugu (Andhra Pradesh), Kannada (or Kanarese, Mysore state), and Malayalam (Kerala state) languages.

In spite of this linguistic differentiation, the literatures composed in all of these languages reflect, in different degrees, the monumental influence of Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit being the universal Indian language of culture. This influence was one of both substance and form: in substance it provided the basic themes of literary enterprise, notably through the epics, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, the Hindu popular texts of the Purāṇas, especially the Bhāgavata, and the mythological repertory that came with Sanskritic Hinduism; in form, Sanskrit belles lettresbequeathed models of literary composition, and Sanskrit poetics provided the aesthetic theory underlying the models. The impact of Islām created a new language, Urdu (from Persian: Camp), based on Hindi; Urdu was the lingua franca of the army. Urdu was used later for literature and at present is the mother tongue of most Indian Muslims and their brethren in Pakistan. Its influence, however, does not compare with that of Sanskrit.

Comparable to the impact of Sanskrit, but far more alien, is that of English, which began to assert itself in the 18th century. The language brought with it new literary forms that were gradually adapted to the old ones, producing new genres—without necessarily giving up the older ones—in the local languages and giving rise to an interesting literature in the English language. Once more, a universal cultural language to a large extent unified aims in the scattered languages; English still plays this role, though it appears to be slowly declining.

Sanskrit, Pāli, and Prākrit literatures: 1400 bc–ad 1200

Sanskrit: formative period (1400–400 bc)

The oldest document in the literature of South Asia is the Rigveda, or Veda of the Stanzas (c. 1400 bc), the fundamental text of Brahminical Hinduism. Not literary but religious-magical in its purposes, it is mostly a compilation of hymns, dedicated to a number of gods of the Vedic religion. They have the regular structure of an invocation: the attention of the god is evoked; a brief account of some of his feats is given, to hold his attention; and an exhortation for his help concludes the hymn. The poets, of whom little is known, appear to have come at the close of a priestly poetical tradition, rivalling one another in allusions to obscure exploits, in language often opaque and at times intended to mystify. Nevertheless, the Rigvedic hymns include lines of great beauty. They may occur in a riddling verse, such as “When the ancient Dawns first dawned, the great Syllable was born in the footsteps of the Cow,” alluding to the birth of speech at the beginning of creation. Or they may occur in poetry addressed to a deity whose beauty inspires the poet to well-turned lines. To the Dawns, for example: “They approach equally in the east, spreading themselves equally from the same place./ The Goddesses waking from the seat of order, like herds of kine set loose, the Dawns are active”; or to the goddess of the night: “Night coming on, the goddess shines/ In many places with her eyes:/ All-glorious she has decked herself./ Immortal goddess, far and wide/ She fills the valleys and the heights:/ Darkness with light she overcomes.”

Nonsacred verses are very rare in the Rigveda, but, when they occur, they can be quite powerful, as in a hymn of a gambler, who is speaking:

Although not literary in purpose, the Rigveda had a decisive influence on the form of Sanskrit poetry: except for narrative verse, the basic unit of all subsequent poems (no matter how many verses they consist of) is the single stanza that contains one complete thought.

The second Veda (c. 1200 bc), the Yajurveda (Veda of the Yajus [Formulas]), contains sacred formulas recited by a group of priests at the great Vedic sacrifices; and the third (c. 1100 bc), the Sāmaveda (Veda of the Chants), is in essence an anthology of the Rigveda. More literary interest attaches to the fourth Veda (1200 bc), the Atharvaveda (an atharvan was a special priest), which contains hymns, incantations, and many magic charms.

The succeeding literature (c. 1000–700 bc), the Brāhmaṇas (“Disquisitions About the Ritual”), continues not the poetry but the liturgical concerns of the Rigveda. They were written in a dry, expository prose, so that only their narrative portions have any literary interest. Much the same is true of the next layer of Vedic texts (800–600 bc), the Āraṇyakas (“Books Studied in the Forest”). But the picture changes in the Upaniṣads (c. 1000–500 bc; “Collections of Esoteric Equations”). These prose texts at times convey the actual mode of teaching of a revered sage, in a style that can be strikingly intimate:

“Bring me a fruit of that nyagrodha (banyan) tree.”

“Here it is, venerable Sir.”

“Break it.”

“It is broken, venerable Sir.”

“What do you see there?”

“These seeds, exceedingly small, venerable Sir.”

“Break one of these, my son.”

“It is broken, venerable Sir.”

“What do you see there?”

“Nothing at all, venerable Sir.”

The father said: “That subtle essence, my dear, which you do not perceive there—from that very essence this great nyagrodha arises. Believe me, my dear.”

While the older Upaniṣads are in prose, the later ones, dating from around 500 bc, mark a shift back to verse. They are the oldest examples of didactic verse, a genre that later gained enormous popularity.

The contribution of late-Vedic texts to later literature is preeminently that of the development of an expository prose style and the evolution of a sacred language, which, in order to be effective, must be completely correct. Thus, the Vedic religion evolved a science of phonetics and, later, of grammar, which was summed up in the 5th or 6th century bc by the grammarian Pāṇini in Aṣṭādhyāyī (“Eight Chapters”), a book that was to become basic to Sanskrit education. This language, Sanskrit, remained the language par excellence for later literature and was used for literary purposes until the 13th century and, epigonically, until today.

After the formative period of the Vedic age, literature moved in several different directions. The close of the Vedic period was one of great cultural renewal, with the founding of the new monastic religions of Buddhism and Jainism (6th century bc) and the more slowly emerging rearticulation of Brahminism into Hinduism. Neither the earliest Buddhists nor the Jains availed themselves of Sanskrit in their preachings, apparently viewing the language as the preserve of a Brahmin elite. Sanskrit continued in derivative works of Vedic inspiration and above all in the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa.

Mahābhārata

From references in Vedic literature it appears that side by side with the ritual texts there flourished a more secular literature carried on by bards. Originally charioteers to noblemen and thus witnesses of their feats, they chronicled the martial history of the families to which they were attached. From these beginnings, part chronicle, part panegyric, developed the epic style.

Like most Sanskrit poetry, the Mahābhārata consists of couplets, two successive lines with the same metre. Generally, one metre is used throughout the poem, though for stylistic effects other metres may be interspersed. The epic metre, or śloka, is a very fluid one that lends itself excellently to improvisation. The Mahābhārata is the longest poem in history, with about 100,000 couplets, more than seven times the size of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined. Its characters go back to around 1000 bc, but in its present form the epic could not have been composed before 400 bc. From that time until ad 400, it underwent continuous elaboration, by insertions of episodes (one of which is related in the religious poem called the Bhagavadgītā), accounts of separate adventures of the heroes, tales generated by their ancestors, and so on; and in the end it became a storehouse of general Hindu lore, with lengthy didactic books inserted.

The main narrative of the Mahābhārata recounts the growing up of two sets of cousins, both of whom aspire to a throne, the title to which is clouded. The protagonists, the Pāṇḍavas, stake their possessions in a dice game with the antagonists, the Kauravas, who are in effective control of the realm; they lose, and must live for 13 years in exile. This the five brothers do, along with the wife they hold in common. Upon their return from exile, they are refused their promised share of the kingdom, and, though parleys are held, war is inevitable. All of the Indian dynasties and tribes take sides in a war that lasts for 18 days, which only seven warriors, among them the Pāṇḍavas, survive. Noteworthy is the picture of gloom and doom that the Mahābhārata draws: there is little extolling of the heroic virtues of prowess and gallantry; rather, the wastefulness and bloodshed of war are pointed up, prefiguring a later concern with ahiṃsā, or nonviolence.

This summary does no justice to an extremely complex story with hundreds of participants, but it sketches the general outline of epic events. The main story has an unmistakable epic and heroic tone, and some of the events and encounters are completely comparable to those in epics of other peoples. But narrative and stylistic unity are disrupted by the inserted quasi-related and unrelated secondary episodes, each of which has a style of its own, ranging from light badinage to sonorous morality tales. It was in these episodes that the Mahābhārata lived on and greatly influenced succeeding literature; the story of Śakuntalā, for example, which the great 5th-century classical poet Kāīĭẖāsa embroidered, the slaying of Śiśupāla, the battle of the hero Arjuna with the mountain man, the story of Nala, and so on. But the most celebrated episode surely is the Bhagavadgītā.

The influence of the Bhagavadgītā (“Song of the Lord”) has mainly been on the development of Hindu religion and philosophy. Still, it is open to doubt whether it would have exerted this influence were it not for its poetry. Like most of the Mahābhārata, the style is simple and direct, not given to embellishment; nevertheless, the poem often reaches the height of expressiveness, as in its evocation of the theophany of Krishna as Vishnu, in the 11th of its 18 chapters. It led to imitations such as the Īśvaragītā, (“Song of the Lord [Śiva]”), also in the Mahābhārata, in which the god Śiva (Shiva) is celebrated.

While the unity of the Mahābhārata has been disrupted by interpolations, the unity of the second epic, the Rāmāyaṇa, has been remarkably preserved. It is less an epic than a romance, recounting the story of prince Rāma and his wife Sītā. The first book, a later addition, tells of the youth of the prince, who later, by the trickery of one of his father’s wives, is excluded from the throne to which he is heir. He goes into voluntary exile in the forests with his wife and his brother Lakṣmaṇa. There a demon, Rāvaṇa, abducts Sītā to his island kingdom of Laṅkā. In the course of his quest for her, Rāma allies himself with a monkey nation, whose general, Hanumān, later revered as a god, discovers Sītā on Laṅǐā. A monumental battle ensues. “As the sky can only be likened to the ocean and the ocean to the sky, so the battle of Rāma and Rāvaṇa can only be likened to the battle of Rāvaṇa and Rāma.” After his victory, Rāma is restored to the throne, but (in what appears to be a later addition) the populace accuses Sītā of misbehaviour, probable adultery, while in Laṅkā. Rāma thus abandons her to a hermitage (the sage of the hermitage, Vālmīki, is credited with the authorship of the Rāmāyaṇa), where she gives birth to their twin sons. Ultimately, Rāma takes Sītā and his sons back. In the later additions, the first and probably the last books, King Rāma is accepted as an incarnation of the god Vishnu, rather than merely a perfect man and hero.

It is the main story of the romance that has made an indelible impression on Indian culture, morally as well as literarily. Rāma is the perfect, just king; Sītā, the model of an Indian wife; Lakṣmaṇa (the brother), the paragon of fraternal love; and the monkey Hanumān, the epitome of a servitor’s loyalty. It was translated into and adapted in many modern Indian languages, and (like parts of the Mahābhārata) it found its way into Java. Vālmīki himself was hailed by later classical poets as the first true poet (kavi), and indeed much of his work has a poetic freshness and literary intention that is largely absent from the Mahābhārata. Vālmīki’s great tools are metaphor and simile, as is also true of later literature. He delights in description of pastoral scenes, in lamentations and grand martial spectacles, and in the idyll of the hermitage, which depicts a serene sage leading a life of quiet meditation and living on simple forest fare in a tranquil woodland close to a sacred river. And the entire work is suffused with a confident, unwavering morality, for which the heroes of the Mahābhārata are still searching.

The role of the Mahābhārata as the storehouse of Hindu lore was supplemented by the Harivaṃśa (“Genealogy of Hari”—that is, the god Vishnu), which deals with the ancestry and exploits of Krishna, the Pāṇḍavas’ friend and adviser in the epic but now wholly deified and identified with the great god Vishnu. Then, from perhaps the 4th century, the literature of the Purāṇas took over. Encyclopaedic works, often of considerable length, the Purāṇas deal with the mythology of time and space and of deities, with sagas of great heroic dynasties, and with legends of saints and ascetics; their interest is largely religious. Aesthetically, the most important of them is the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa (9th or 10th century), which celebrates the blessed lord (bhagavat) Vishnu in his many theophanies but is particularly evocative in its celebration of Vishnu’s incarnation as Krishna and the playful story of his youth. The influence of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa, particularly the 10th book, on Indian religion, art, and literature has been monumental. In the opinion of one scholar, this book constitutes the greatest poem ever written; and so it is in the popular estimation of the Hindus. It was adapted in many Indian languages and provided themes and scenes for the flourishing miniature styles of the Middle Ages.

No more than the Vedic literature do the literatures of early Buddhism and Jainism have a literary intention. Their texts, written in dialects other than Sanskrit, articulate the teachings of the religious founders and their successors. Because they were transmitted orally for a considerable time before they were written down in the form they would retain, they underwent the inevitable censorship of the centuries, both negative in the form of documents dropped out of use and positive in the form of newer documents added. The dates given here are only approximations of the time of the documentary fixation of the dates.

The earliest records of Buddhism are not textual but inscriptional, in the famous edicts of the Mauryan emperor Aśoka, who reigned c. 269–232 bc. Among these inscriptions on stone, the so-called 13th rock edict—in which Aśoka, after the massacre of the Kaliṅgas (modern Orissa), abjures war—is the most moving document of any dynastic history. The inscriptions were written in a variety of Prākrits; that is, Indo-Aryan languages closely cognate to, but considerably later than, the earliest stabilized Sanskrit.

The vehicle of the extant textual literature is the Pāli language, which is held to be a western Indian dialect on a substratum of several central and eastern ones. It was the language in use by the Theravāda school of Buddhism; but, since that school became the dominant one among many in early Buddhism, the Pāli language is often identified with the Buddha’s own speech. Most of the canonical literature is exclusively of religious interest, but interspersed in it are works of considerable literary interest.

Foremost perhaps are discourses put into the Buddha’s mouth—for example, his sermon “In the Deer Park”—and no doubt deriving from fairly accurate memories. With their straightforward, lively, and incisive style, homely similes, and simple humour, they are excellent examples of the homiletics of early Buddhist preaching. Incorporated in the canon, too, are more general works of literature. The Dhammapada (“Verses on the Buddhist Doctrine”) is a fine example of the moralistic, aphoristic strain in Indian literature, in which virtue is extolled and vice condemned. It has remained a work of considerable diffusion in all Buddhist countries, and, as in the case of the Bhagavadgītā in Hinduism, much of its popularity is due to its literary style. The Suttanipāta collection of the Buddhist canon, composed in a more formal style, contains 55 narrative and didactic poems, in the form of dialogues and ballads; they are composed in a metre akin to the Sanskrit śloka. Of great interest are the Theragāthā and the Therīgāthā (“Hymns of the Senior Monks” and “Hymns of the Senior Nuns”), which give at times a vivid insight into the ambience in which a conversion to Buddhism took place: a monk celebrates his newfound freedom in an idyll of the hermit’s life; and a nun reminisces over the pains of deserting her home and child, yet without regrets, since she has won the freedom of Buddhism. The prosodic variety of Buddhist lyrics is great; about 30 different metres can be distinguished. Pāli poems, with their new metres (often based on a musical phrase), stylistic features, figures of speech, and choice diction, foreshadow classical kāvya literature in Sanskrit, whose extant specimens date from a later period.

Of great importance is a huge volume called Jātakas (“Birth Stories”), recounting some 500 episodes supposedly having occurred in the Buddha’s earlier lives. Only those parts in archaic verse are canonical; the prose portion was written later (c. 3rd century ad), probably in Ceylon. The Jātakas consist of fairy tales, animal stories and fables (the future Buddha may be incarnate in an animal), ballads, and anecdotes. Though their setting is often imaginary, they provide significant material for the historian of society and culture. These mostly short tales abound in moving, delicate, often rustic touches that have made them the delight of the Buddhist world. Their themes are illustrated in bas-reliefs of Buddhist shrines (or stūpas) at Bhārhut and Sānchi and monumentally on the great stūpa of Java, the Borobudur.

Of considerable literary as well as historical interest is the Pāli text Milinda-pañha (“The Questions of Milinda”). Milinda is identical to the Greek Menander, the name of a Bactrian Indo-Greek king (c. 140–110 bc) who was skeptical of the verities of Buddhism and was enlightened by the teaching of an elder, Nāgasena. The extensive Buddhist erudition that the sage displays is artfully presented in the form of simile and parable, and the work has contributed importantly to the edification of audiences in the countries where Buddhism came to be established. The style, in spite of the repetitions so typical of Buddhist doctrinal texts, is lively and presents the reader with an invaluable picture of contemporary Indian life.

Less interest attaches to Jaina canonical works, which were written in an adapted and stabilized literary dialect called Ardhamāgadhī (Semi-Māgadhī, Māgadhī being the dialect of the ancient kingdom of Magadha, in present day Bihār). The belletristic contribution of Jaina literature is discussed below.

Classical Sanskrit kāvya (200–1200)

Prepared for by the systematization of the Sanskrit language by Pāṇini, the development of the great epics, notably the Rāmāyaṇa, and the refinements of prosody represented by the Pāli lyrics, there arose, in the first centuries ad, a Sanskrit literary style that governed canons of taste for a millennium and remained influential far later through modern Indian languages and their literatures. The style, called kāvya, is characterized by an extremely self-conscious effort on the part of the writer to compose poetry pleasing to both the ear and the mind. It evolved an elaborate poetics of figures of speech, among which the metaphor and simile, in their many manifestations, predominate; a careful use of language, governed by the stated norms of grammar; an ever-increasing tendency to use compound nouns instead of drawing on the quite plentiful possibilities of Sanskrit inflection; a sometimes ostentatious display of erudition in the arts and sciences; an adroitness in the use of varied and complicated, if appropriate, metres—all applied to traditional themes such as the epic had provided and to the rendering of emotions, most often the love between men and women.

The style finds its classical expression in the so-called mahākāvya (“great poem”), most akin to the epyllion (“miniature epic”) art form of the Alexandrian poets (a school of Greek poets, c. 3rd–1st centuries bc); the strophic lyric (a lyric based on a rhythmic system of two or more lines repeated as a unit); and the Sanskrit theatre. It can also be extended to narrative literature, especially the prose novel. The great masters in the Kāvya form (which was also exported to Java) were Aśvaghoṣa, Kālidāsa, Bāṇa, Daṇḍin, Māgha, Bhavabhūti, and Bhāravi.

The earliest surviving kāvya literature was written by a Buddhist, Aśvaghoṣa, said to have been a contemporary of the Kuṣāṇa (Kushān) king Kaniṣka (1st century ad). Aśvaghoṣa’s work also marks a shift away from the Pāli of the Theravāda branch of Buddhism back to the more and more accepted Sanskrit of the Mahāyāna branch. Two works are extant, both in the style of mahākāvya: the Buddhacarita (“Life of the Buddha”) and the Saundarānanda (“Of Sundarī and Nanda”). Compared with later examples, they are fairly simple in style but reveal typical propensities of writers in this genre: a great predilection for descriptions of nature scenes, for grand spectacles, amorous episodes, and aphoristic observations. The resources of the Sanskrit language are fully exploited; stylistic embellishments (alaṅkāra) of simile and metaphor, alliteration, assonance, and the like are employed, often quite felicitously. The original Buddhacarita, rediscovered in 1892, had been known from Tibetan and Chinese translations. The Sanskrit text is fragmentary, breaking off in the 14th canto (major division of the poem) with the enlightenment of the Buddha, while the other versions take the story through the Buddha’s Nirvāṇa. Though intended to instruct the reader to turn away from the sensuous life and follow the Buddha’s path, the work is at its best in descriptions of that very life. This is even more apparent in the Saundarānanda, which recounts a well-known story of how the Buddha converted his half-brother Nanda, who was deeply in love with his wife, Sundarī, and with the good life, to the monastic life of austerity. In his mastery of the intricacies of prosody and the subtleties of grammar and vocabulary, Aśvaghoṣa shows himself the complete forerunner of the Hindu mahākāvya authors.

In its classical form, a mahākāvya consists of a variable number of comparatively short cantos, each composed in a metre appropriate to its particular subject matter. The subject matter of the mahākāvya itself is taken from the epic, which is not, however, followed slavishly. Most mahākāvyas display such set pieces as descriptions of cities, oceans, mountains, the seasons, the rising of the sun and moon, games, festivals, weddings, embassies, councils, war, and triumph. It is typical of the genre that, while each strophe, or stanza, is intended to be part of a narrative sequence, it more often stands by itself, a discrete unit conveying one idea or developing one image. In this, the tendency of the Rigvedic stanza (see above Sanskrit: formative period [1200–400 bc]) continues in the classical literature. Although the lines of the classical stanza are long enough to convey their meaning quite explicitly, it is the pride of the poet to suggest rather than to express. Sometimes this is done by simple collocation of words: for example, in the first line of Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta a yakṣa (a mischievous elf-like creature) is afflicted by a curse, “the more painful because it spelt separation from his beloved”; the next word notes that he had been negligent in his duties; taken together, the two words, though syntactically unrelated, suggest that it was his amour that made him neglect his duties. Another common suggestive device is the double meaning, or play on words. These double meanings often add a certain graceful playfulness to the poetry, reminding one that the poem was written first of all to give pleasure to the man of taste.

Traditionally there are six model mahākāvyas, three by Kālidāsa and one each by Bhāravi, Māgha, and Śriharṣa, to which sometimes the Bhaṭṭikāk̄ya is added.

Nothing is known with certainty of the life of Kālidāsa, the greatest of Sanskrit poets, but there is substantial agreement that at one time he lived in Ujjayinī (Ujjain, in the present state of Madhya Pradesh), the capital of Avanti and an important centre of Sanskrit culture in a commercially busy area. His name, which means Servitor of Kālī, indicates that he was a follower of that goddess, whom he was to celebrate as Pārvatī, the daughter of the mountain, in the Kumārasaṃbhava. Probably he lived during the reign of Chandra Gupta II Vikramāditya (c. 380–c. 415), and there are reports that he died, by the hand of an envious courtesan, while a guest of King Kumāradāsa of Ceylon.

Compared with those of others, Kālidāsa’s style might be called simple, but it is a very studied, very felicitous simplicity, hiding the actual complexity of his constructions. In two of his mahākāvyas, Kālidāsa draws on epic lore. The first, and probably earlier one, is the Kumārasaṃbhava (“Birth of the War God”), which describes the courting of the asceticŚiva, who is meditating in the mountains, by Pārvatī, the daughter of the Himalayas; the destruction of the god of love (after his arrow has struck Śiva) by the fire from Śiva’s third eye; and the wedding and lovemaking of Śiva and Pārvatī, which results in the conception of the war god. The original is in eight cantos, but a sequel was added by an imitator. The second mahākāvya, the Raghuvaṃśa (“Dynasty of Raghu”), deals with themes from the Rāmāyaṇa: it describes the vicissitudes of the Solar dynasty of the ancient Indian barons, culminating in the Rāmāyaṇa story of Rāma and Sītā. The Raghuvaṃśa is famous for its beautiful descriptions and incidental narratives, which give the poem a somewhat episodic character; among them are a description of the six seasons (spring, summer, rainy, autumn, winter, and dewy) and the story of a young hermit who went to the river to fill a water jar for his parents and was killed by a stray arrow.

Unique in Sanskrit love poetry is Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta, in which the poet tries to go beyond the strophic unity of the short lyric (see below The short lyric), which normally characterizes love poems, by stringing the stanzas into a narrative. This innovation did not take hold, though the poem inspired imitations along precisely the same story line. The Meghadūta is the lament of an exiled yakṣa who is pining for his beloved on a lonely mountain peak. When, at the beginning of the monsoon, a cloud perches on the peak, he asks it to deliver a message to his love in the Himalayan city of Alakā. Most of the poem, composed in an extremely graceful metre, consists of a description of the landmarks, cities, and the like on the cloud’s route to Alakā. It must be considered among the finest poems, if not the finest poem, written in Sanskrit. Kālidāsa also wrote for the theatre (see below The theatre) and was no doubt the most versatile author of Sanskrit literature; his works became well-nigh canonical models.

Bhāravi (6th century) probably hailed from the south during the reign of the Pallava dynasty. He took up a Mahābhārata theme in his Kirātārjunīya (“Arjuna and the Mountain Man”), recounting the Pāṇḍava prince Arjuna’s encounter and ensuing combat with a wild mountaineer who in the end proves to be the god Śiva. Bhāravi’s language and style are more difficult than Kālidāsa’s, but the poem is highly regarded in Indian literary tradition.

Māgha, who wrote in the 8th century, was a conscious rival of Bhāravi, whom he attempted to surpass in every respect. His Śiśupālavadha (“The Slaying of King Śiśupāla”) is based on an episode of the Mahābhārata in which the rival King Śiśupāla insults the hero-god Krishna, who beheads him in the ensuing duel. Māgha is a master of technique in the strict Sanskrit sense of luscious descriptions; intricate syntax; compounds that, depending on how they are split, deliver quite different meanings; and the full register of stylistic embellishments.

To some critics, the preoccupation with technique, the triumph of form over substance, appears to have spelled the doom of the mahākāvya. A curious but entirely Sanskritic phenomenon, for example, is the Bhaṭṭikāvya, a poem by Bhaṭṭi (probably 6th or 7th century). It again deals with the story of Rāma and Sītā, but at the same time it illustrates in stanza after stanza, in exactly the proper sequence, the principal rules of Sanskrit grammar and poetics. Less artificial is the Naiṣadhacarita (“The Life of Nala, King of Niṣadha”), written by the 12th-century poet Śrīharṣa and based on the story of Nala and Damayantī in the Mahābhārata. An example of another kind of excess indulged in by mahākāvya writers is the Rāmacarita (“Deeds of Rāma”), by the 12th-century poet Sandhyākāra, which celebrates simultaneously the hero-god Rāma and the poet’s own king, Rāmapāla of Bengal. Many other works were written in this style, and, even today, one may encounter a mahākāvya treatment of a great man such as Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru.

Difficult to classify is the work of the 12th-century Bengal poet Jayadeva, who wrote the Gītagovinda (“Cowherd Song”). The basic structure of this long poem, in which the poet recounts the youthful loves of the cowherd hero and god Krishna, largely based on the story of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa, is that of the mahākāvya. Generously interspersed between cantos, however, are erotic-religious lyrics of extremely musical assonances, which were, and still are, sung. Jayadeva’s work, rather lacking in the grammatical rigidity of the other mahākāvya writers, has been extremely popular and affords a fine example of the devotional lyric (see the section below, and see also Bengali).

The short lyric

It is in the short, one-stanza lyric that Sanskrit poetry is revealed most intimately in its real aims. As noted, almost all of high Sanskrit poetry is strophic in fact; in the lyric it is so in intention. It is eminently a genre of the poetic moment, making an aesthetic observation and placing it within the Sanskritic universe of discourse. It may be an observation of anything: a fish glintingly jumping from a pond, aboriginal tribesmen engaged in a bloody rite, love in all its manifestations, a glimpse of God perceived or remembered. But in the monumental lyric collections that have been preserved, and in the many stray verses still circulating among educated Hindus in India as so-called subhāṣitas (“well-turned” couplets), the more common topics are praise of the god of one’s devotion and the vagaries of love.

In the short lyric it is hard to make a distinction that depends on the language in which it is composed; for, although the language may be different, the subject matter and forms are the same. Many love lyrics, especially when they describe feelings experienced by women, are composed not in Sanskrit but, instead, in one of the Prākrits, or Middle Indo-Aryan languages, among which the dialect called Māhārāṣṭrī is particularly popular. The collection of 700 poems in this language, compiled by Hāla under the name of Sattasaī (“The Seven Hundred”), tends to be simpler in imagery and in the emotion portrayed than their Sanskrit counterparts, but essential differences are difficult to pinpoint.

The devotional lyric, a short verse expressing the author’s devotion to a god, is linked with both the hymnal poetry of the Rigveda—though far less determined by a desire for compelling magic—and the temple worship of Hinduism. Though by no means always, there is often a particularism about them: the deity is invoked as it appears in a specific iconic stance or in a local temple or in a manifestation especially pleasing to the poet. The number of such verses is countless; every major religious and philosophic leader is held to have added to their stock. Some are especially famous: the Sūryāṣṭaka (“Eight Strophes for the Sun”), by Mayūra; the collections attributed to the philosopher Śaṅkara, the Saundaryalaharī (“The Wavy River of the Beautiful Sky”); and the Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta (“The Elixir of Hearing of Krishna”), by Bilvamaṅgala, among others. These stotra (“lyrics of praise”) quite often were set to music, and people continue to sing them today—without necessarily comprehending the full intention of the Sanskrit, much as hymns in Latin were traditionally sung by Roman Catholic believers.

The entire erotic experience, from budding love to the aftermath of consummation, is represented brilliantly in lyric poetry. But among the many themes inspired by love, poets have been most attracted to the lament of separated lovers. It is mostly the sufferings of the woman that are portrayed, but the grief of the man is also depicted—in Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta, for example. The love lyrics consist of single verses, many of which seek to suggest the mood of śṛṅgāra (physical love). While often extremely erotic, they are very rarely obscene. Sanskrit norm banned all coarse expressions for sexual play; and, although much probably escapes the modern reader, blunt allusions to genital organs are rare and, where allusions occur, extremely veiled. Bodily parts with less overt sexual connotations, such as breasts and buttocks, are frankly mentioned and described—in fact, celebrated. In allusions to sexual intercourse the terminology of the Kāmasūtra of Vātsyāyana is frequently invoked, as though this ancient textbook of Indian erudition was a protection against possible opprobrium—not unlike Latin terms resorted to in the West for actions that most know by shorter, more colloquial names.

The erotic and the devotional lyric merge freely, and at times it is impossible to make out whether the free sexual imagery employed is to be taken literally or as an allegory of the human soul courting the love of its god. The task—not a very pressing one—is made more difficult by the fact that some bhakti (devotion) religions have developed the poetics of love poetry into a kind of theology, a phenomenon quite characteristic of Bengal Krishnaism (see below Indo-Aryan literatures: 12th–18th century).

Authors of subhāṣitas often collected them themselves, the favourite form being that of the śataka (“century” of verses), in which 100 short lyrics on a common theme were strung together. Mention has been made of Hāla’s Sattasaī (“The Seven Hundred,” consisting of lyrics in the Māhārāṣṭrī dialect). Four well-known Sanskrit collections, of the 7th century, are the famous “century” of Amaru, king of Kashmir, and the three “centuries” by the poet Bhartṛhari; one of the latter’s collections is devoted to love, another to worldly wisdom—a very popular theme in epigrammatic verse—and the third to dispassion. Of the same type but in a different vein is Caurapañcāśikā (“Fifty Poems on Secret Love”), in which the 12th-century poet Bilhaṇa fondly recalls the pleasure of his clandestine amours with a local princess.

The theatre

Of all the literary arts, the Indians esteemed the play most highly, and it is in this form that most of the other arts were wedded together. Its origins are obscure, but there is reason to assume that the play developed out of recitations of well-known epic stories by professional reciters. It is an extremely rich genre with a number of outstanding playwrights.

The style is extremely varied. Although it might be called a Sanskrit play, Sanskrit is by no means the only language used, for the less educated characters, including all women, speak Prākrits of different degrees of niceness. The action is carried by prose, but at the least provocation—indeed, at any of the poetic moments characteristic of the strophic lyric—the author reverts to verse, sometimes in mid-sentence. Two principal types of play are distinguished: the nāṭaka, which is based on epic material, and the prakaraṇa, which is of the author’s invention, though often borrowed from narrative literature.

Characteristic of the Sanskrit theatre are elements of sacrality. The play begins and ends with a benediction, many of which consist of subject matter taken from sacred texts. It is also expressed in numerous taboos: the play must have a happy outcome in which harmony, interrupted by the drama of the play, is restored; improper scenes, such as eating, dressing and undressing, and sexual intercourse, are not to be portrayed; no violence among the higher characters is permitted; war, which often occurs, should simply be reported on, often by lower characters, not in any way staged.

Fragments of Buddhist plays prior to the flowering of Hindu theatre have survived, but no complete plays earlier than 13 ascribed to the playwright Bhāsa. There is considerable controversy over the authenticity of the Bhāsa plays, but at least some of them must be authentic, perhaps dating back to the 3rd century. The plays are based on the epic and on the Bṛhat-kathā narrative cycle (see below); among the latter, the Svapnavāsavadattā (“The Dream of Vāsavadattā”) is the most famous. Of considerable interest also is the Daridra-Cārudatta (“The Poverty of Cārudatta”), which became the basis for the play Mṛcchakaṭika (“Little Clay Cart”) of Śūdraka (see below).

It must be assumed that there was an efflorescence of poetry and theatre in the city of Ujjayinī, one of the capitals of the Gupta Empire, in the 5th century, for a number of authors can be placed there during this reign; among these were Viśākhadatta, Śūẖraka, Śyāmilaka, the writer of one of the best farces, and Kālidāsa, who at the beginning of the development of the genre produced some of the greatest plays in the tradition.

Three plays by Kālidāsa remain, one of which is the Mālavikāgnimitra (“Agnimitra and Mālavikā”), a harem play of amorous intrigue at a royal court. The other two are based on old themes. Vikramorvaśī (“Urvaśī Won by Valour”) is based on a story as old as the Rigveda, that of the nymph Urvaśī, who is loved by King Purūravas, whom she marries on the condition that she shall never see him nude. The accident happens, and the nymph returns to heaven, leaving her husband crazed with longing, until a final reunion. But the Indian tradition holds the Abhijñānaśakuntalā (“Śakuntalā and the Token of Recognition”) to be the greatest of all Sanskrit plays. It recounts a Mahābhārata story—rather freely to be sure—of a hermit girl secretly married to a visiting king, who leaves with her a keepsake that will serve her as a token of recognition. She gives birth to a son, Bharata, and goes to the King’s court; on the way she loses the ring in a river, where a fish swallows it. The King fails to recognize her and rejects her, and her mother, a nymph, carries her to heaven. When the ring is recovered by a fisherman and the King’s memory is restored, he searches for Śakuntalā but does not find her. In the end he meets a boy who proves to be his son and is restored to him.

Kālidāsa’s great forte is the portrayal of emotions—ordinary enough in themselves (budding love, love consummated, rejection, despair, a father’s love for his son)—but Kālidāsa applies to them a mastery of expression and image that makes the play a work of perennial beauty.

Next to nothing is known of Śūdraka except that he must have hailed from Ujjayinī. His is the most charming of all prakaraṇa plays (those that are not based on epic material): the Mṛcchakaṭikā (“Little Clay Cart”), the story of an impoverished merchant and a courtesan who love each other but are thwarted by a powerful rival who tries to kill the woman and place the blame on the hero, Cārudatta. The play offers a fascinating view of the different layers of urban society. Viśākhadatta, the author of a rare semi-historical play called Mudrārākṣasa (“Minister Rākṣasa and his Signet Ring”), apparently was a courtier at the Gupta court. His play is a dramatization of the Machiavellian political principles expounded in the book Artha-śāstra, by Kauṭilya, who appears as the hero of the play.

To the 7th-century king Harṣa of Kanauj are attributed three charming plays: Ratnāvalī and Priyadarśikā, both of which are of the harem type; and Nāgānanda (“The Joy of the Serpents”), inspired by Buddhism and illustrating the generosity of the snake deity Jīmūtavāhana.

Ranked by Indian tradition close to Kālidāsa himself, Bhavabhūti (early 8th century) was the author of three plays, two of which are based on the Rāmāyaṇa story. The Mahāvīracarita (“The Exploits of the Great Hero”) treats of Rāma’s battle with Rāvaṇa and the Uttararāmacarita (“The Later Deeds of Rāma”) treats of the life of Rāma after he has abandoned Sītā. Bhavabhūti lacks the elegance and grace of Kālidāsa but is more pensive—even brooding—than his predecessor. His style is also very forceful. His prakaraṇa Mālatī-Mādhava (“Mālatī and Mādhava”) is a complex love intrigue intermingled with sorcery and Tantric practices, including a human sacrifice and much violence.

This list by no means concludes that of the playwrights in the Sanskrit tradition. The writing of plays, mostly derivative from the great models, has continued until the present day.

Apart from the more seriously intended plays described above, the Sanskrit theatre also has a rich repertory of farces, which are usually in one act. Most interesting of these are the bhāṇas, which may be monologues in which an actor addresses imaginary persons and is answered by them, as he paints a picture of town life full of personal and social satire. Among the best in this little-studied genre is Śyāmilaka’s 5th-century Pādataḍitaka (“The Courtesan’s Kick”).

Narrative literature

Sanskrit narrative literature is extremely rich, so rich in fact that at one time it was believed that all folktales originally came from India. Many indeed have, and they have found a place in The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and other such works down to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the fables of Jean de La Fontaine. Certain collections of animal tales, some of which go back to the Buddhist Jātaka stories, had incredible histories. The most famous is the Pañca-tantra (“The Five Chapters”), which, within a framework of a lesson in the art of politics addressed to young princes, presents a number of animal characters who in their actions both admonish and exhort the reader to a life certain to lead to worldly success. A shorter version, partly drawn from the Pañca-tantra, is the Hitopadeśa (“Good Advice”). The Pañca-tantra found its way to the West through translations into Persian, Arabic, Syrian, Hebrew, and Latin, until most of the medieval literatures possessed their own versions of it. No less extensive were its migrations to Southeast and East Asia.

The principal work of the novelistic and picaresque tale is the Bṛhat-kathā (“Great Story”) of Guṇāḍhya, written in Prākrit and now lost, save for Sanskrit retellings. The most important among these Sanskrit versions is the Kathā-saritsāgara (“Ocean of Rivers of Stories”) of Somadeva (11th century), which includes so many subsidiary tales that the main story line is frequently lost. Perhaps more faithful to the original—in any case far less distracting—is the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha (“Summary in Verse of the Great Story”), by Budhasvāmin (probably 7th century), one of the most charming of Sanskrit texts. Other collections of tales include the Vetāla-pañcaviṃśatikā (“Twenty-five Tales of a Ghost”), Śūkasaptati (“The Seventy Stories of a Parrot”), and the Siṃhāsana-dvātrim-sātikā (“Thirty-two Stories of a Royal Throne”).

Related to the Bṛhat-kathā cycle, though the exact relationship is unclear, is the Jain Prākrit text of the Vāsudevahiṇḍī, “The Roamings of Vāsudeva” (before 6th century), describing the acquisition of numerous wives by Krishna Vāsudeva.

Though the tales are often artless, sometimes they are elaborately embroidered in the Sanskrit kāvya style. A fine example is the Daśakumāracarita (“Tales of Ten Princes”), by Daṇḍin (6th/7th century), in which, within the framework of a boxing story, the picaresque adventures of 10 disinherited princes are described in prose. While tending overly to description, the work remains eminently readable for the modern reader, a quality that cannot be attributed to the prose novels of the 7th-century writer Bāṇa: the Harṣacarita, “The Life of Harṣa” (king of Kanauj and the author of three plays, discussed above in The theatre), which is important for its information on culture and society; and the Kādambarī (the name of the heroine), which describes the affairs of two sets of lovers through a series of incarnations, in which they are constantly harassed by a cruel fate.

Of the four literary Dravidian languages, Tamil has been recorded earliest, followed by Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. Tamil literature has a classical tradition of its own, while the literatures of the other languages have been influenced by Sanskrit models.

Early Tamil literature (1st–10th century)

Early classical Tamil literature is represented by eight anthologies of lyrics, 10 long poems, and a grammar called the Tolkāppiyam (“Old Composition”). According to a fanciful Tamil tradition, this literature was produced by poets of three “academies,” or śaṅgams, that in the hoary past were centred in the southern Indian city of Madurai and supposedly lasted 4,400, 3,700, and 1,850 years, respectively. The Tolkāppiyam was ascribed to the second śaṅgam, the eight anthologies and 10 long poems to the third; according to tradition, nothing is extant from the first śaṅgam. The early literature, itself known as Saṅgam, comprises 2,381 poems, ranging from four to nearly 800 lines each and assigned to 473 poets who are known by name or epithet; about 100 poems are anonymous. Though the literature does not go back as far as native tradition would have it, it is generally ascribed to the first three centuries of the Christian Era and represents the oldest non-Sanskrit literature to be found on the South Asian subcontinent.

The eight anthologies and their contents, excluding opening invocations that were added later, are as follows: akam anthologies consisting of (1) Kuṟuntokai, 400 love poems, (2) Naṟṟiṇai, 400 love poems, (3) Akanāṉūṟu, 400 love poems, (4) Aiṅkuṟunūṟu, 500 love poems, each 100 (assigned to a different poet) dealing with one of five phases of love, (5) Kalittokai, 150 love poems in a metre called kali; and puṟam anthologies consisting of (6) Puṟanāṉūṟu, 400 poems, (7) Patiṟṟuppattu (“The Ten Tens”), 100 poems on kings (the first and last decades are missing), and (8) Paripāṭal, a collection of 70 religious poems. Paripāṭal and Kalittokai appear to be the latest of the anthologies; Kuṟuntokai and Puṟanāṉūṟu probably contain the earliest compositions. The remarkable work of grammar and rhetoric, Tolkāppiyam, is the crucial text for an understanding of early Tamil language and literature. Divided into three sections (each consisting of cūttirams, or aphorisms)—sounds, words, and meaning—the Tolkāppiyam details, in the third, the canons of Śaṅgam poetic traditions.

In the Tolkāppiyam and the anthologies, poems are classified by theme into akam (“interior”) and puṟam (“exterior”), the former highly structured love poems, the latter heroic poems on war, death, personal virtues, the ferocity and glory of kings, and the poverty of poets. Both the akam and the puṟam had well-defined tiṇais (genres) that paralleled one another: e.g., the kuṟiñci genre, in love poetry, which dealt with the lovers’ clandestine union on a hillside by night; and the veṭci genre, in heroic poetry, which dealt with the first onset of war, by nocturnal cattle stealing. Both kuṟiñci and veṭci are names of flowers that grow on the hillside, here symbolic of the poetic genre, the mood, and the theme. By such pairings across akam and puṟam, love and war become part of the same universe and metaphors for one another; the same poets—for example, Paraṇar and Kapilar—wrote great poems in both genres. The basic technique depended on a taxonomy of Tamil nature and culture, of culturally defined time, space, nature, and human nature. For example, matched in metaphor with five phases of akam love (union; infidelity; anxious waiting; patient waiting; and the lover or lovers eloping or journeying for wealth, knowledge, and so on) are six seasons, six parts (dawn, forenoon, noon, afternoon, evening, and night) of the day, and five landscapes (hill, seashore, forest, pasture, and wasteland, named after characteristic flowers—kuṟiñci, neytal, mullai, and marutam—and the evergreen tree, pālai) and their contents (including gods, foods, birds, beasts, drums, occupations, lutes, musical styles, flowers, and kinds of running or standing water). Each landscape becomes a repertoire of images—anything in it, bird or drum, tribal name or dance, may evoke a specific feeling. A favourite poetic device is uḷḷuṟai (i.e., metonymy, a figure of speech consisting of the description of one thing used to evoke that of another with which it is associated). Thus, the natural scene implicitly evokes the human scene; for example, bees making honey out of kuṟiñci flowers evokes the lovers’ union. Not only is the poet’s language Tamil, but the landscapes, the personae, and the appropriate moods and situations formulate the realities of the Tamil world into a code of symbols. For some five or six generations, the Śaṅgam poets spoke this common language of symbols, creating a body of lyrical poetry probably unequalled in passion, maturity, and delicacy by anything in any Indian literature.

Eighteen Ethical Works

The Patiṟeṇ-kīṟkkaṇakku (“Eighteen Ethical Works”), usually dated as post-Śaṅgam (4th–7th centuries), are all affected by Jainism and Buddhism. Of these the Tirukkuṟaḷ (“Sacred Couplets”), ascribed to Tiruvaḷḷuvar, is the most celebrated. Its 1,330 hemistichs (half lines of verse) are probably the final distillation of different periods. There are many parallels in the work to the Sanskrit Kāma-sūtra, the treatise on erotic love, to Manu-smṛti, an ancient treatise on special obligation and religious law, and to Artha-śāstra, Kauṭilya’s treatise on politics. The Kuṟaḷ has three sections: aṟam, or virtue (Sanskrit dharma); poruḷ, government and society (Sanskrit artha); and kāmam, love (Sanskrit kāma). There is no special treatment of mokṣa, or salvation, though aṟam seems to include it. In the aṟam (virtue) section, the Kuṟaḷ sums up a world-affirming wisdom, the wisdom of human sympathy, expanding from wife, children, and friends to clan, village, and country. In the poruḷ (government and society) section, the aphorisms project a vision of an ideal state, based on educated human nature, and relate the good citizen to the good man. Prostitution, disease, drink, and gambling are listed, with foreign enemies, as dangers to the state. In the kāmam (love) section, the Kuṟaḷ follows the śaṅgam’s love—eros, or sexual love—yet anticipates agape, the perfecting of love through many lives, which appears in religious poetry of the next age.

Epics

The age of the Pallavas (300?–900), a warrior dynasty of Hindu kings, is known for its epics, beginning with Cilappatikāram (“The Jewelled Anklet”) and Maṇimēkalai (“The Girdle of Gems”) and including an incomplete narrative, Peruṅkatai (“The Great Story”), the Cīvakacintāmaṇi (“The Amulet of Cīvakaṉ”) by Tiruttakkatēvar, and Cūḷāmaṇĭ (“The Crest Jewel”) by Tōlāmoḻittēvar. The last three works depict Jaina kings and their ideals of the good life, nonviolence, and the attainment of salvation through self-sacrifice. They are also characterized by excellent descriptions of city and country and by a mixture of supernatural and natural elements. In their episodic methods of narration and set descriptions of erotic, heroic, and religious themes, these Jaina epics became both models and sources for later epic works.

The Cilappatikāram, by Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ, is in three books, set in the capitals of the three Tamil kingdoms: Pukār (the Cōḻa capital), Maturai (i.e., Madurai, the Pāṇṭiya [Pāṇḍya] capital), and Vañci (the Cēra capital). The story is not about kings but about Kōvalaṉ, a young Pukār merchant, telling of his marriage to the virtuous Kaṇṇaki, his love for the courtesan Mātavi, and his consequent ruin and exile in Maturai, where he dies, unjustly executed when he tries to sell his wife’s anklet to a wicked goldsmith who had stolen the Queen’s similar anklet and charged Kōvalaṉ with the theft. Kaṇṇaki, the widow, comes running to the city and shows the King her other anklet, breaks it to prove it is not the Queen’s—Kaṇṇaki’s contains rubies, and the Queen’s contains pearls—and thus proves Kōvalaṉ’s innocence. Kaṇṇaki tears off one breast and throws it at the kingdom of Maturai, which goes up in flames. Such is the power of a faithful wife. The third book deals with the Cēra king’s victorious expedition to the north to bring Himalayan stone for an image of Kaṇṇaki, now become a goddess of chastity (pattin̥i).

The Cilappatikāram is a fine synthesis of mood poetry in the ancient Tamil Śaṅgam tradition and the rhetoric of Sanskrit poetry—even the title is a blend of Tamil and Sanskrit—including in the epic frame akam lyrics, the dialogues of Kalittokai (poems of unrequited or mismatched love), chorus folk song, descriptions of city and village, lovingly technical accounts of dance and music, and strikingly dramatic scenes of love and tragic death. One of the great achievements of Tamil genius, the Cilappatikāram is a detailed poetic witness to Tamil culture, its varied religions, town plans and city types, the commingling of Greek, Arab, and Tamil peoples, and the arts of dance and music.

Maṇimēkalai (the heroine’s name, “Girdle of Gems”), the second, “twin,” epic (the last part of which is missing), by Cātaṉār, continues the story of the Cilappatikāram; the heroine is Mātavi’s daughter, MaîimKkalai, a dancer and courtesan like her mother. Maṇimēkalai is torn between her passion for a princely lover and her spiritual yearnings, the first encouraged by her grandmother, the second by her mother. She flees the attentions of the prince, and, while he pursues her, she attains magical powers: she changes forms; survives prison, lecherous villains, and other dangers; converts the Queen; and finally goes to Pukār, which is being destroyed by oceanic erosion, worships Kaṇṇaki, and arrives in Vañcī to work in famine relief and to perform “penance.” Unlike the Cilappatikāram, the Maṇimēkalai is partisan to Buddhism. It is known for its poetry and its lively discussions of religion and philosophy.

From the 6th century onward, a movement with religious origins made itself heard in literature. The movement was that of bhakti, or intense personal devotion to the two principal gods of Hinduism, Śiva and Vishnu. The earliest bhakti poets were the followers of Śiva, the Nāyaṉārs (Śiva Devotees), whose first representative was the poetess Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, who called herself a pēy, or ghostly minion of Śiva, and sang ecstatically of his dances. Tirumūlar was a mystic and reformer in the so-called Siddhānta (Perfected Man) school of Śaivism, which rejected caste and asceticism, and believed that the body is the true temple of Śiva. There were 12 early Nāyaṉār saints. Similar poets, in the tradition of devotion to the god Vishnu, also belonged to this early period. Called Āḻvārs (Immersed Ones), they had as their first representatives Poykai, Pūtaṉ, and Pēyār, who composed “centuries” (groups of 100) of linked verses (antāti), in which the final line of a verse is the beginning line of the next and the final line of the last verse is the beginning of the first, so that a “garland” is formed. To these Āḻvārs, God is the light of lights, lit in the heart.

The most important Nāyaṉārs were Appar and Campantar, in the 7th century, and Cuntarar, in the 8th. Appar, a self-mortifying Jain ascetic before he became a Śaiva saint, sings of his conversion to a religion of love, surprised by the Lord stealing into his heart. After him, the term tēvāram (“private worship”) came to mean “hymn.” Campantar, too, wrote these personal, “bone-melting” songs for the common man. Cuntarar, however, who sees a vision of 63 Tamil saints—rich, poor, male, female, of every caste and trade, unified even with bird and beast in the love of God—epitomizes bhakti. To him and other Bhaktas, every act is worship, every word God’s name. Unlike the ascetics, they return man to the world of men, bringing hope, joy, and beauty into religion and making worship an act of music. Their songs have become part of temple ritual. Further, in bhakti, erotic love (as seen in akam) in all its phases became a metaphor for man’s love for God, the lover.

In the 9th century, Māṇikkavāḫakar, in his great, moving collection of hymns in Tiruvācakam, sees Śiva as lover, lord, master, and guru; the poet sings richly and intimately of all sensory joys merging in God. Minister and scholar, he had a child’s love for God.

Āṇṭāḷ (8th century), a Vaiṣṇava poetess, is literally love-sick for Krishna. Periyāḻvār, her father, sings of Krishna in the aspect of a divine child, originating a new genre of celebrant poetry. Kulacēkarar, a Cēra prince, sings of both Rāma and Krishna, identifying himself with several roles in the holy legends: a gopī in love with Krishna or his mother, Devakī, who misses nursing him, or the exiled Rāma’s father, Daśaratha. Tiruppāṇāḻvār, an untouchable poet (pāṇan̥), sang 10 songs about the god in Śrīraṅgam, his eyes, mouth, chest, navel, his clothes, and feet. To these Bhaktas, God is not only love but beauty. His creation is his jewel; in separation he longs for union, as man longs for him. Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār, religious philosopher, probably guru (personal religious teacher and spiritual guide in Hinduism) to the Pallava kings, and poet of more than 1,000 verses, was apparently responsible for the building of many Vaiṣṇava temples. The last of the Āḻvārs, Nammāḻvār (Our Āḻvārā, writing in the 9th century, expresses poignantly both the pain and ecstasy of being in love with God, revivifying mythology into revelation.

The next period, the time of the Tamil Cōḷa Empire (10th–13th centuries), saw an awakening of neighbouring literatures: Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. The first extant Kannada work is the 9th-century Kavirājamārga (“The Royal Road of Poets”), a work of rhetoric rather indebted to Sanskrit rhetoricians, containing the first descriptions of the Kannada country, people, and dialects, with references to earlier works. From the 10th century on, campū narratives (part prose, part verse) became popular both in Kannada and in Telugu, as did renderings of the Sanskrit epics Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata and Jaina legends and biography.

In Kannada, this period was dominated by the “three gems” of Jaina literature, Pampa, Ponna, and Ranna, as well as by Nāgavarma I, a 10th-century Kannada grammarian. Pampa was the ādikavi (“first of poets”), having attained that stature with two great epics: Vikramārjuna Vijaya and Ādipurāṇa. The former is a rendering of the Mahābhārata, with the hero, Arjuna, identified with the poet’s royal patron, Arikēsarī. This felicitous epic is known for its succinct, powerful characterizations, its rich descriptions of Kannada country and court, its moving sentiments, and its harmonious blend of Sanskrit and Kannada. While the Vikramārjuna is a secular work, Pampa’s Ādipurāṇa tells the story of the Jaina hero-saint Purudēva, his previous lives, his life from birth to marriage to holy death, as well as the lives of his sons, Bharata and Bāhubali.

Telugu had its ādikavi (“first of poets”), in the Brahmin Nannaya Bhaṭṭa (1100–60), who, in campū style, wrote three books of a version of the Mahābhārata, later finished by Tikkana (13th century) and by Errāpraggaḍa. Like other regional versions of the Mahābhārata, the Telugu version is not a literal translation but an interpretation, with many local elements and differences of emphasis; for example, Nannaya emphasizes the importance of Vedic religion. Such works have made the Sanskrit epics and Purāṇas part of a live and growing tradition, both oral and literary, in the regional language.

This period also saw the eminence of Kampaṉ’s Tamil version of the Rāmāyaṇa (12th century). In him there is a climactic blend of earlier Śaṅgam poetry, Tamil epics, the Āḻvārs’ fervour of personal bhakti (devotion) toward Rāma, folk motifs, and Sanskrit stories, metres, and poetic devices. Instead of a just king and a perfect man, Rāma is an incarnation of Vishnu and an intense object of devotion, dwarfing the Vedic gods; Kampaṉ called his work Irāmāvatāram (“Rāma’s Incarnation”); yet the emphasis is not on Vishnu but on dharma (“the law”), localized and Tamilized. More like Sanskrit than Śaṅgam poets, Kampaṉ revels in elaborate metaphor, hyperbole, and fanciful descriptions of virtue and nature. The work is long, consisting of about 40,000 lines; the Yuttakāṇṭam (“War Canto”) alone, with 14 battles, equals the Iliad in length. The poem is also justly known for its variety of style, its exploitation of the resources of Tamil and Sanskrit both in form and content, its humour, and its handling of the narrative, dramatic, and lyric modes.

Kampaṉ’s popularity extended not only into all of Tamil country but apparently into the north, influencing some episodes of Tulsī’s Hindi version of the Rāmāyaṇa, and into northern Kerala, where 32 plays based on Kampaṉ are enacted ritually with marionettes in Śiva temples.

Pre-15th-century Tamil influence on early Malayalam, the language of Kerala, was strong and led to the literature of pāṭṭu (“song”), in which only Dravidian, or Tamil, phonemes may occur and Tamil-like second-syllable rhymes are kept. The best known pāṭṭu is Rāmacaritam (c. 12th–13th century; “Deeds of Rāma”), probably the earliest Malayalam work written in a mixture of Tamil and Malayalam. Other pāṭṭus in Tamilized Malayalam, written by a family of poets (14th–15th centuries) from Niraṇam in central Travancore, appear in Kaṇṇassan Pāṭṭukaḷ, in which Tamil conventions of metre and phonology are loosened and more Sanskrit is allowed. Similar in style is a version of the Rāmāyaṇa by Rāma Paṇikkar, an abridged Bhagavadgītā by his uncle Mādhava Paṇikkar, and a condensed Mahābhārata and the 10th book of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa by another uncle, Śaṅkara Paṇikkar.

As strong as Tamil influence was, the predominant influence on Malayalam was Sanskrit, in language as well as literary form. The influence on language led early to a mixture of Sanskrit and Malayalam in a literary dialect called maṇipravāḷa (meaning “necklace of diamonds and coral”). The author of the Līlātilakam, a 14th-century treatise on grammar and poetics, describes both the Tamilizing and Sanskritizing trends and genres and insists on harmonious blendings. Many kinds of poems were composed in maṇipravāḷa styles: kūḍyāṭṭams (dramatic presentations using Sanskrit ślokas, or epic metres, for hero and heroine, maṇipravāḷa for the clown, and Malayalam for explanations intended for the laity); didactic works such as the 11th-century Vaiśikatantram (“Advice to a Courtesan by Her Mother”); 13th- and 14th-century campūs (narratives combining prose and verse) on dancers, such as Unniyati Caritam by Dāmōdara Cākkiyār; and several short poems in praise of women and kings. Maṇipravāḷa poems like these are essentially artifical expressions of courtly high-caste poets, preoccupied with eroticism and harlots. The Candrōtsavam (c. 1500; “Moon Festival”) is a satire on the voluptuary maṇipravāḷa tradition, jostling together all the famed courtesans of the period.

Coexisting with the Tamilized and Sanskritized Malayalam poems produced by scholars was a live pacca (“pure, fresh”) Malayalam tradition represented mostly by folk songs and ballads—for example, Vaḍukkan Pāṭṭukaḷ (hero ballads of the northern Malabar Coast); songs sung during weddings, deaths, or festivals; and work songs. All three styles—the indigenous folk style, the Tamil, and the Sanskrit—began to converge and influence each other by the 15th century in works such as Kṛṣṇa Pāṭṭu (“Song of Krishna”) and Gāthā (“Song”). Such grafting reached its full flowering in the 16th-century poet Eḻuttaccan (Father [or Leader] of Letters), who popularized the kiḷippāṭṭu (“parrot song”), a genre in which the narrator is a parrot, a bee, a swan, and so on. His outstanding works are Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇam, Bhāratam, and Bhāgavatam, all based on Sanskrit originals yet powerfully re-created with masterly language craft.

While Vaiṣṇava works were proliferating in Malayalam, Śaiva movements swept the other three languages, Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu. In Tamil, the hymns of the Nāyaṉārs were arranged and anthologized for scriptural and recitative use by the 11th century. Another such consolidation of sacred materials was Cēkkiḻār’s 12th-century Toṇṭar Purāṇam, or Periyapurāṇam, narrating in epic style the lives of the 63 great Śaiva saints and creating a tradition for all Śaivas, even in the Kannada and Telugu areas. The theology of the Siddhānta (Perfected Man) school of Śaivism was elaborated in Meykaṇṭār’s Civañāṉa-pōtam (13th century).

By the 12th century, a new Kannada genre, the vacana (“saying” or “prose poem”), had come into being with the Vīraśaiva saints. In the language of the people, the saints expressed their radical views on religion and society, rejected both Brahminical ritualism and Jaina ascetic world negation, called all men to the anubhāva (“experience”) of God, and broke the bonds of caste, creed, and sexual difference. Five important poet-saints were Dāsimayya; Basava, a self-searching social reformer and a minister of the Jaina king Bijjaḷa; Allama Prabhu, the elder and metaphysical master of them all; Mahādēviyakka, a woman saint singing love poems to Śiva; and Cannabasava, a brilliant theologian of the movement, who elaborated the theory of “six stages” of mystic ascent for the devotee. The many-facetted lyrics written by the poet-saints were in the spoken dialects of Middle Kannada, yet they drew on archetypal human images as well as ancient pan-Indian symbology for their intense and searing expressions of bhakti. Inspired by these lyrics, Harihara, in the late 12th century, wrote some 120 ragaḷe (blank verse) biographies of the Śaiva saints, including the Vīraśaiva (or Liṅgāyat) and the earlier Tamil Nāyaṉārs. In the early 13th century, his disciple and nephew, Rāghavāṅka, wrote, in ṣaṭpadis (six-line stanzas), of the lives of saints, in well-structured works such as Sōmanātha Carite and Siddharāma Caritra; his most mature work is Hariścandrakāvya, an unequalled reworking of an ancient Job-like story of Hariścandra, who suffered every ordeal for his love of truth. The Vīraśaiva saints’ lives and the vacana (“saying” or “prose poem”) literature were codified in a masterpiece called Śūnya Sampādane (“The Achievement of Nothing”), consisting of dialogues interweaving the saints’ vacanas, with the poet Allama Prabhu as the central figure.

Contemporary with the 13th-century Vīraśaiva saints were Telugu Śaiva poets such as Pālkuriki Sōmanātha, who composed the Basavapurāṇam employing popular metres and idiomatic Telugu. His Paṇḍitārādhya Caritra is a life of the Śaiva devotee Paṇḍitārādhya as well as a book of general knowledge including social customs, arts, crafts, and particularly music. His Vṛṣādhipa Śatakam consists of verses in Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Sanskrit, and Telugu. This work was probably the first of the genre of śatakas (“centuries” of verses) literature, particularly popular in Telugu but also written in the other three languages as well as in Sanskrit (see above Sanskrit: formative period [1200–400 bc]).

Also of the 13th century is Āṇḍayya’s Kabbigara Kāva (“The Poet’s Defender”), in Kannada, a linguistic tour de force, eschewing unmodified Sanskrit forms; and Mallikārjuna’s Sūktisudhārṇava, an excellent Kannada anthology of lyrics and passages. From 1240 to 1326, poets of Telugu produced over 100 verse renderings of the Sanskrit epic Rāmāyaṇa and many more in prose, the earliest being Raṇganātha Rāmāyaṇa, assigned to Gōna Buddhā Reḍḍi.

14th–19th century

The next age, from the 14th to the 16th century, is the great age of the Vijayanagar Empire. In this period, Kannada and Telugu were under the aegis of one dynasty and were also hospitable to the influence of neighbouring Muslim Bahmanī kingdoms. Śrīnātha was a 15th-century poet honoured in many courts for his scholarship, poetry, and polemics. He rendered Sanskrit poems and wrote Haravilāsam (Four Śaiva Tales); Krīḍābhirāmam, a charming, often vulgar account of social life in Warangal; and Palanāṭi Vīra Caritra, a popular ballad on a fratricidal war. Many erotic cāṭus, or stray epigrams, are also attributed to him. Bammera Pōtana, a great Śaiva devotee in life and poetry, unschooled yet a scholar, is widely known for his Bhāgavatam, a masterpiece that is said to excel the original Sanskrit Bhāgavata-Purāṇa. Tāḷḷapāka Annāmācārya, son of a great family of scholars, fathered an exciting new genre of devotional song, all addressed to the god Śrī Veṅkaṭeśvara of Tirupati (a form of Vishnu). His Saṅkīrtana Lakṣaṇam is a collection of 32,000 songs in Sanskrit and Telugu, which made a significant contribution to Karnatic (southern Indian) musical technique.

The 16th century was an age of patronage by Vijayanagar kings, beginning with Kṛṣṇa Dēva Rāya, himself a poet versed in Sanskrit, Kannada, and Telugu. The rāyala yugam (“age of kings”) was known for its courtly prabandhas, virtuoso poetic narratives by and for pandits (learned men). Among the most famous court poets were Piṅgaḷi Sūranna, whose verse novel, Kalāpurṇōdayam (1550)—a story full of surprises, magic, and changes of identity—is justly celebrated for its artistry; and Tenāli Rāmakṛṣṇa, known for his clownish pranks and humour, whose writings are the centre of a very popular cycle of tales in all four Dravidian languages.

During the 16th century and for the next few centuries, Telugu poets also flourished outside the Telugu country, especially in Tanjore (Thanjavūr) and Madurai, in Tamil country, and Pudukkoṭṭa and Mysore, in Kannada country. Their most important contribution was to native Kannada and Telugu dance drama on mythological themes, called yakṣagāna. The form is comparable to kathākali in the Malayalam area and to terukkūttu (“street drama”) and kuṟavañci (“gypsy drama”) in the Tamil area. The earliest Telugu yakṣagāna text is Sugrīva Vijayam (c. 1570), by Kandukuru Rudra Kavi; the earliest in Kannada is probably Śāntavīra Dēśika’s Saundarēśvara (1678). The most celebrated of Kannada yakṣagāna dramatists is the versatile Pārti Subba, who flourished around 1800 and is known for his moving Rāmāyaṇa episodes and songs.

The 15th and 16th centuries produced some of the most popular classics in Kannada. Of these the greatest is Gadugu’s Kumāra Vyāsa, or Nāraṇappa’s, 10 cantos of the Mahābhārata; recited in assemblies as well as in households, these are a continual delight, abounding in humour, passion, and memorable poetry. In Prabhuliṅgalīle, Cāmarasa made poetry out of the life of the poet-saint Allama. The Jaimini Bhārata and the many versions of Rāmāyaṇa episodes (especially Sītā’s abandonment in the forest) written by the distinguished Śaiva epic poet Lakṣĩīśa are known for their melodious verses and moving scenes. Ratnākaravarṇi’s Bharateśa Vaibhava is a great Jaina story, tersely told in a Kannada song metre and celebrated for its depiction of many rasas (“moods”), especially the erotic.

Kannada Vaiṣṇava dāsas (“servants [of God]”) wrote in a song genre called pada, parallel and often indebted to the Vīraśaiva vacanas (“sayings” or “prose poems”). Purandaradāsa, a rich 16th-century merchant turned mendicant, saint, and poet, composed bhakti (devotional) songs on Viṭṭhala (a manifestation of the god Vishnu), criticizing divisions of caste and class and calling on the mercy of God. His padas and kīrtanas (“lauds”) are also landmarks in Karnatic music. Karnatic music. Kanakadāsa, his contemporary and a shepherd by birth, wrote padas and longer popular works. Dāsa songs are part of the repertory of all South Indian musicians.

The folk tripadi (“three-line verse”) of Sarvajña (1700?) is a household word for wit and wisdom, like the Kuṟaḷ in Tamil (see above Eighteen Ethical Works) and the “century” of four-line verses in Telugu by Vēmana (15th century). The moral, social, satiric, and wise proverb-like aphorisms of Vēmana and Sarvajña are widely quoted by pundit and layman alike. Equally popular in the Malayalam region is the 18th-century folk poet of tuḷḷals (a song-dance form), Kuñcan Nampiyār, unparalleled for his wit and exuberance, his satiric sketches of caste types, his versions of Sanskrit Purāṇa narratives projected on the backdrop of Kerala, and his humorous renderings even of mythic characters.

The 17th and 18th centuries also saw Tamil court poetry—Purāṇas, translations from the Sanskrit, and praise poems, known more for their learning and imitative character than for their genius. This was also a period of many schisms and the founding of monasteries in Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism, which led to many sectarian and polemic works. Muslims and Christians also wrote epics in the Hindu Purāṇa style; for example, Umaṟḱ-p-pulavar’s 17th-century Cīṟā-p-purāṇam, on the life of the prophet Muḥammad, and Father Beschi’s Tēmpāvaṇi, on the life of St. Joseph, with echoes from both Kampaṉ and the 16th-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso.

Probably the most impressive Tamil poetry of this period is that of Arunakiriv’s learned and melodious Tiruppukaḻ (praise of Munikaṉ) and of the Cittars, eclectic mystics known for their radical, fierce folk songs and common-speech style. Tāyumāṉavar (18th century) and Paṭṭiṉattār (and later, in the 19th century, Rāmaliṅkar) are poets of unconditioned love, self-search, and rejection of corrupt society.

The 17th and 18th centuries are also periods of datable folk expression, which include many tiruviḷaiyāṭal (“stories of God’s sport”) purāṇas; temple tales (about miracles that took place in the temple); kuṟavañci (i.e., “gypsy,” a kind of musical dance drama); paḷḷus (plays about village agricultural life); realistic noṇṭi-nāṭakams (“dramas of the lame”), in which a Hindu temple god cures lameness; kummi songs sung by young girls, clapping as they dance round and round; and ammāṉai ballads. Noteworthy historical ballads are Kaṭṭa Pommaṉ, about a chieftain who revolted against the British, and Tēciṅku-rācaṉ Katai, about the prince of Gingi and his Muslim friend. Malayalam āṭṭakkatha, the literature associated with kathākali, the complex traditional dance drama, was also written during this period. Royal poets such as Kōṭṭayattu Tampurān, in the 17th century, and Kārttika Tiruṉal, in the 18th, wrote āṭṭakkathās.

Indo-Aryan literatures: 12th–18th century

It is difficult to pinpoint the time when the Indo-Aryan dialects first became identifiable as languages. Around the 10th century ad, Sanskrit was still the language of high culture and serious literature, as well as the language of ritual. The spoken language, however, had continued to develop, and at the turn of the millennium there began to appear, at different times during the subsequent two or three centuries, the languages now known as the regional languages of the subcontinent: Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Sindhi (which did not develop an appreciable literature), and Assamese; Urdu did not develop until much later (see below Islāmic literatures: 11th–19th century).

The literatures in their early stages show three characteristics: first, a debt to Sanskrit that can be seen in their use of Sanskrit lexicon and imagery, in their use of myth and story preserved in that refined language, and frequently in their conformity to ideals and values put forward in Sanskrit texts of poetics and philosophy; second, a less obvious debt to their immediate Apabhramsha past (dialects that are immediate predecessors of the modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars); third, regional peculiarities.

The narratives in the early stages of the development of the languages are most often mythological tales drawn from the epics and Purāṇas of classical Hindu tradition (see above Sanskrit, Pāli, and Prākrit literatures: 1400 bc–ad 1200), though in later times, in the 17th and 18th centuries, secular romances and heroic tales were also treated in narrative poems. Although the themes of the narratives are based on Purāṇa tales, often they include materials peculiar to the area in which the narrative was written.

In addition to themes, regional literatures frequently borrowed forms from the Sanskrit; for example, the Rāmāyaṇa appears in a 16th-century Hindi version by Tulsīdās, called the Rāmcaritmānas (“Lake of Rāma’s Deeds”), which has the same form, though a different emphasis, as the Sanskrit poem. The stylized conventions and imagery of Sanskrit court poetry also appear, though here, too, with different emphasis; for example, in the work of the 15th-century Maithili (Eastern Hindi) lyric poet Vidyāpati. Even the somewhat abstruserhetorical speculations of the Sanskritic poetic schools of analysis were used as formulas for the production of 17th-century Hindi court poetry; the Rasikapriyā (“Beloved of the Connoisseur”) of Keśavadāsa is a good example of this kind of tour de force.

There are other characteristics common to the regional literatures, some of which come not from Sanskrit but most likely from the Apabhramsha. There are two poetic forms, for example, that are found in many northern Indian languages: the bārah-māsā (“twelve months”), in which 12 beauties of a girl or 12 attributes of a deity might be extolled by relating them to the characteristics of each month of the year; and the caūtīs (“thirty-four”), in which the 34 consonants of the northern Indian Devanāgarī alphabet are used as the initial letters of a poem of 34 lines or stanzas, describing 34 joys of love, 34 attributes, and so on.

Finally, there are common characteristics that may have come either through Apabhramsha or through the transmission of stories and texts from one language to another. The stories of Gopi-candra, the cult hero of the Nātha Yogī sect, a school of mendicant sannyāsins, were known from Bengal to the Punjab even in the early period. And the story of the Rājput heroine Padmāvatī, originally a romance, was beautifully recorded, with a Ṣūfī (mystic) twist, by the 16th-century Muslim Hindi poet Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī and later by the 17th-century Bengali Muslim poet Ālāol. From the late 13th through the 17th century, bhakti (devotional) poetry took hold in one region after another in northern and eastern India. Beginning with the Jñāneśvarī, a Marathi verse commentary on the Bhagavadgītā written by Jñāneśvara (Jñānadeva) in the late 13th century, the devotional movement spread through Mahārāshtra, in the works of the poet-saints Nāmdev and Tukārām; through Rājasthān, where it is represented by the works of Mīrā Bāī; through northern India, in the poetry of Tulsīdās, Sūrdās, Kabīr, and others; through Mithilā, in the work of the great poet Vidyāpati; and into Bengal, where Caṇḍīdās and others sang of their love of God. Because of the bhakti movement, beautiful lyric poetry and passionate devotional song were created; and in some cases, as in Bengal, serious philosophical works and biographies were written for the first time in a regional language rather than in Sanskrit. The languages and their literatures gained strength as mediums of self-expression as well as exposition. And, although there is much Sanskrit imagery and expression in the poetry and song, as well as similarities to Sanskrit textual models, its basic character is not Sanskritic: true to the nature of any spoken, everyday language, it is more vital than polished, more vivid than refined.

One more historical generality can be stated regarding regional Indian literature before considering the characteristics peculiar to the several “Indian literatures.” In all of the early literatures, writing was lyrical, narrative, or didactic, entirely in verse, and all in some way related to religion or love or both. In the 16th century, prose texts, such as the Assamese histories known as the buranji texts, began to appear.

What is commonly spoken of as Hindu is actually a range of languages, from Maithili in the east to Rajasthani in the west. The first major work in Hindi is the 12th-century epic poem Pṛthvīrāj Rāsau, by Chand Bardaī of Lahore, which recounts the feats of Pṛthvīrāj, the last Hindu king of Delhi before the Islāmic invasions. The work evolved from the bardic tradition maintained at the courts of the Rājputs. Noteworthy also is the poetry of the Persian poet Amīr Khosrow, who wrote in the Awadhi dialect. Most of the literature in Hindi is religious in inspiration; in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the reform-minded Kabīr, for example, wrote sturdy short poems in which he sought to reconcile Islām and Hinduism.

The most celebrated author in Hindi is Tulsīdās of Rājāpur (died 1623), a Brahmin who renounced the world early in life and spent his days in Benares (Vārānasi) as a religious devotee. He wrote much, mostly in Awadhi, and focussed Hinduism on the worship of Rāma. His most important work is the Rāmcaritmānas (“Sacred Lake of the Acts of Rāma”), which is based on the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa. More than any other work it has become a Hindu sacred text for the Hindi-speaking area and annually has been staged in the popular Rām Līlā festival.

Outstanding among the followers of Vallabha, philosopher and bhakti (“devotion”) advocate of the Middle Ages, is the blind poet Sūrdās (died 1563), who composed countless bhajans (chants) in praise of Krishna and Rādhā, which are collected in the Sūrsāgar (“Ocean of Sūrdās”). While many of the bhakti poets were of modest origin, an exception was Mīrā Bāī, a princess of Jodhpur, who wrote her famous lyrics both in Hindi and Gujarati; the quality of her poetry, still very popular, is not as high, however, as that of Sūrdās. Significant also is the religious epic Padmāvatī by Jāyasī, a Muslim from former Oudh state. Written in Awadhi (c. 1540), the epic is composed according to the conventions of Sanskrit poetics.

The 18th century saw the beginning of a gradual transformation from the older forms of religious lyric and epic to new literary forms influenced by Western models that began to be known. The new trends reached their pinnacle in the work of Prem Chand (died 1936), whose novels (especially Godān) and short stories depict common rural life; and in the work of Harishchandra of Benares (died 1885), honoured as Bhāratendu (Moon of India), who wrote in the Braj Bhasha dialect.

While developments in Bengali literature began somewhat earlier, they followed the same general course as those in Hindi. The oldest documents are Buddhist didactic texts, called caryā-padas (“lines on proper practice”), which have been dated to the 10th and 11th centuries and are the oldest testimony to literature in any Indo-Aryan language.

Bengali poetry, including poetry by Bengalis in other dialects, is largely written in three distinct genres. It is certain that well before the 15th century there existed texts in a typically Bengali genre called maṅgal-kāvya (“poetry of an auspicious happening”), which consists of eulogies of gods and goddesses; such poetry is likely to have had a considerable history in oral transmission before it was committed to writing. A good example of an orally transmitted maṅgal poem is the Caṇḍī-mȧngal (“Poem of the Goddess Caṇḍī”), by Mukundarāma, which was put into written form in the latter part of the 15th century. Maṅgal poetry remained a favourite genre well into the 18th century, when Bhārat-candra wrote the Annadā-maṅgal (“Maṅgal of the Goddess Annadā [the Giver of Food]”), a witty and sophisticated poem that bears little resemblance to its more rustic forebears. Despite this popularity, it is the devotional lyrics to the divine pair Krishna and Rādhā that are still known and sung today in Bengal, and these lyrics are the gems of medieval Bengali literature.

Poems of the second genre, the mahākāvya (“great poem,” but not to be confused with the Sanskrit mahākāvya genre), are based mainly on the Sanskrit models of the Mahābhārata, Rāmāyaṇa, and Purāṇas. Kṛttibās Ojhā (late 14th century) stands at the beginning of this literature; he wrote a version of the Rāmāyaṇa that often differs from the Sanskrit original, for he includes many local legends and places the setting in Bengal. Kavīndrā (died 1525) wrote on the Mahābhārata theme, as did Kāsiram Dās in the 17th century.

The third genre, padāvalī (“string of verse”) songs, is also found elsewhere; inspired by the religious bhakti movement, the songs resemble the devotional poetry of the Nāyaṉārs and Āḻvārs in Tamil. It was such poetry that established Bengali as a significant literary language. The earliest work in what may be considered a distinctively Bengali style is the Śrīkṛṣṇa-kīrtana (“Praise of the Lord Krishna”), a long padāvalī poem by Caṇḍīdās, which is dated to the early 15th century. In it the poet praises the virtues and celebrates the loves of Krishna, a theme that had remained popular in Bengal ever since its first glorification by the Bengali Sanskrit poet Jayadeva, who composed his Gītagovinda (“The Cowherd Song”) in the 12th century. Padāvalī songs describe and glorify all phases of Krishna’s love for the cowherds’ wives (especially Rādhā, who later became a goddess), and it is love poetry before it is religious poetry. After the great Bengali mystic and saint Caitanya (died 1533), love is religion, and the erotic is inspirited with religious fervour. The great flowering of this poetry occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Religious edification took the forms not only of maṅgals and padāvalīs but also of biography (more like hagiography) and philosophy. Important in that style is the long hagiography Caitanya-caritāmṛta (“Elixir of the Life of Caitanya”), by the 16th-century author Kṛṣṇadās.

While most of the literature is Hindu in theme and inspiration, there arose a secular Bengali literature among Bengali Muslims. One of the outstanding Muslim poets is Ālāol, author of the Padmāvatī (c. 1648), which was written after the poem of the same name by the Hindi poet Jāyasī.

The earliest text in a language that is incontestably Assamese is the Prahlāda-caritra of Hema Sarasvati (or Saraswati; 13th century); in a heavily Sanskritized style it tells the story, from the Viṣṇu-Purāṇa, of how the mythical king Prahlāda’s faith and devotion to Vishnu saved him from destruction and restored the moral order. The first great Assamese poet was Kavirāja Mādhava Kandalī (14th century), who translated the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and wrote Devajit, a narrative on the god Krishna. In Assamese, too, the bhakti movement brought with it a great literary upsurge; the most famous Assamese poet of the period was the saint-poet Śaṅkaradeva (1449–1568), whose 27 works of poetry and devotion are alive today and who inspired such saint-poets as Mādhavadeva to write lyrics of great beauty. Peculiar to Assamese literature are the buranjis, chronicles written in a prose tradition brought to Assam by the Ahoms of Burma. These date in Assamese from the 16th century, while in the Ahom language they are much earlier.

Mādaḷā-pāñji (“The Drum Chronicle”) texts in Oriya, the chronicles of the great temple of Jagannātha in Puri, date from the 12th century. They are in prose, and as such they represent the earliest prose in a regional Indo-Aryan language, although they cannot be said to be literary texts. The 14th century was productive for Oriya literature. Dating from this period are the anonymous Kalasa-cautīśa, which tells in 34 verses the story of the marriage of the god Śiva and the mountain goddess Pārvatī, and the famous Caṇḍī-purāṇa of Saraladāsa. But the bhakti period was once again the most stimulating one; the best known medieval Oriya poet is Jagannātha Dās (whose name means Servant of Jagannātha), a 16th-century disciple of the Bengali Vaiṣṇava saint Caitanya, who spent the better part of his life in Puri. Among the many works of Jagannātha Dās is a version of the Sanskrit Bhāgavata-Purāṇa that is still popular in Orissa today.

With Bengali, Marathi is the oldest of the regional literatures in Indo-Aryan, dating from about ad 1000. In the 13th century, two Brahminical sects arose, the Mahānubhāva and the Varakari Panth, both of which put forth vast quantities of literature. The latter sect was perhaps the more productive, for it became associated with bhakti, when that movement stirred Mahārāshtra in the early 14th century, and particularly with the popular cult of Viṭṭhoba at Pandharpur. It was out of this tradition that the great names of early Marathi literature came: Jñāneśvara, in the 13th century; Nāmdev, his younger contemporary, some of whose devotional songs are included in the holy book of the Sikhs, the Ādi Granth; and the 16th-century writer Eknāth, whose most famous work is a Marathi version of the 11th book of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa. Among the bhakti poets of Mahārāshtra the most famous is Tukārām, who wrote in the 16th century. A unique contribution of Marathi is the tradition of povāḍās, heroic stories popular among a martial people. There is no way of dating the earliest of these; but the literary tradition is particularly vital at the time of Śivajī, the great military leader of Mahārāshtra (born 1630), who led his armies against the might of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

The oldest examples of Gujarati date from the writings of the 12th-century Jaina scholar and saint Hemacandra. The language had fully developed by the late 12th century. There are works extant from the middle of the 14th century, didactic texts written in prose by Jaina monks; one such is the Bālāk̄abodha (“Instructions to the Young”), by Taruṇa-prabha. A non-Jaina text from the same period is the Vasanta-vilāsa (“The Joys of Spring”). The two Gujarati bhakti poets, both of the 15th century, are Narasiṃha Mahatā (or Mehtā) and Bhālaṇa (or Puruṣottama Mahārāja); the latter cast the 10th book of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa into short lyrics. By far the most famous of the bhakti poets is the woman saint Mīrā Bāl, who lived in the first half of the 16th century. Mīrā, though married, thought of Krishna as her true husband, and the lyrics telling of her relationship with her god and lover are among the warmest and most movingly personal in any Indian literature. One of the best known of the non-bhakti Gujarati poets is Premānanda Bhaṭṭa (16th century), who wrote narrative poems based on Purāṇa-like tales; although his themes were conventional, his characters were real and vital, and he infused new life into the literature of his language.

Punjabi developed a literature later than most of the other regional languages of the subcontinent; and some of the early writings, such as those of the first Sikh Gurū, Nānak (late 15th and early 16th centuries), are in Old Hindi rather than true Punjabi. The first work identifiable as Punjabi is the Janam-sākhī, a 16th-century biography of Gurū Nānak by Bala. In 1604, Arjun, the fifth Gurū of the Sikhs, collected the poems of Nānak and others into what is certainly the most famous book to originate in the Punjab (though its language is not entirely Punjabi), the Adi Granth (“First Book”). Writing that is not merely incidentally Punjabi began in the 17th century and is almost entirely by Muslims. Between 1616 and 1666, a writer named ʿAbdullāh, for example, composed a major work called Bāra Anva (“Twelve Topics”), which is a treatise on Islām in 9,000 couplets. Muslim Ṣūfīs, such as Bullhē Shāh (died 1758), also contributed many devotional lyrics, and Ṣūfī Islām can be said to have been the main stimulus to Punjabi literature in the medieval period. There are also many romances in the language (as in Rajasthani) which, being oral literature, are undatable.

The hitherto commonly accepted period of Old Kashmiri is 1200–1500; but in fact the earliest example of the language is found in 94 four-line stanzas embedded in the Sanskrit philosophical work Mahānaya-prakāśa (“Illumination of the Highest Attainment”), which some scholars now date as late as the 15th century. As is true for Gujarati, the most famous poets of Kashmiri in this period are women. Lallā (14th century) wrote poems about the god Śiva; and Hubb Khātun (16th century) and especially Arani-mal (18th century) are famous for their hauntingly beautiful love lyrics. Despite these outstanding poets in Kashmiri, the great literary language of Kashmir in the medieval period was Persian, which was encouraged by many rulers of the country, such as Zayn-ul-ʿĀbidīn, in whose 15th-century court were many scholars and poets writing in both the Kashmiri and Persian languages.

The adventure of Islām in India began in the 8th century with the conquest of Sind (the extreme western province), but it was only in the 11th and 12th centuries that Muslim literary and cultural traditions reached the Indian heartland. Then, in the 13th century, refugee noblemen, soldiers, and men of letters from Iran and Central Asia came pouring into India. Although the causes changed, the attraction of India as a place of refuge and gracious patronage did not decline for several subsequent centuries. At the same time Muslim soldier-adventurers continued with their conquests, joining hands with their non-Muslim Indian counterparts in many instances, establishing minor or major kingdoms all over the subcontinent. The political map of India remained very much in flux—except for a brief period during the reign of Akbar—until Queen Victoria declared herself empress of India in 1858. The period of Muslim influence thus extends over 800 years.

At the time of the spread of Muslim power and culture in India, Sanskrit was the chief language of Hindu cultural, learned, and religious expression, while Buddhism and Jainism had lent their prestige and patronage to various Prākrits. The progress of and developments in these literatures remained unaffected by the advent of Islām in India. The emergence of the new Indo-Aryan languages out of the Prākrit and Apabhramsha stages of Sanskrit, however, was furthered by the newcomers, who preferred these regional languages over Sanskrit and encouraged the development of popular regional literatures. The conversion to Islām of a large number of indigenous people enhanced these developments. Thus, the vehicles of literary expression used by those professing Islām in India were regional dialects and languages, both Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian, such as Braj, Awadhi, Sindhi, Baluchi, Urdu, Dakhini, and Bengali, as well as the foreign Arabic, Turkish, and Persian spoken by the Muslim immigrants and conquerors. Of these, only Persian and Urdu require detailed consideration; the others will be discussed only briefly.

Arabic was the language of the conquerors of Sind. But it enjoyed more permanent prestige as the language of the Qurʾān, the sacred book of Islām; as such it was extensively used for religious scholarship during the medieval period. Even as late as the 18th century, Shāh Walī Allāh, the greatest theologian to have lived in India, wrote his most important treatises in Arabic. Arabic was also used early for historiography and for making Indian scientific books available to the Middle East in translation. One does not find, however, much in the way of significant Arabic belles lettres in India.

Although the earliest Muslim conquerors in northern India were Turks, their language was Persian. It was only during the reigns of Bābur and his son Humāyūn (1526–56) that Turkish flourished for a while as a medium of learned expression. Bābur himself was the foremost contributor. Although his memoirs are better known, he also left a volume of verses of considerable merit.

Regional languages

The literatures of the Indo-Iranian languages of Baluchi and Pashto are exclusively creations of Muslim writers. In the Indo-Aryan languages of Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Punjabi, Muslims were the most influential contributors; the names of Lallā (14th century) for Kashmiri, Shāh ʿAbd-ul-Laṭīf (17th–18th century) for Sindhi, and Wāris̄ Shāh (18th century) for Punjabi exemplify that fact. Muslim chieftains gave impetus to the growth of Bengali literature through their patronage of writers and through their efforts to have Sanskrit classics translated into Bengali. There are also many famous Muslim names during the medieval period of Bengali literature, such as Dawlat Qāz̄ī and Ālāol in the 17th century. In the heartland of northern India, notable contributions were made by Muslims to Hindi literatures in the Braj and Awadhi dialects. Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī, Raḥīm, and Manjhan (all 16th century) and ʿUs̄man (17th century) are some of the important names. In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries in India there was a tremendous production of mystic (Ṣūfī and bhakti) poetry in all of the important dialects and languages. It was a period of great mystic, syncretic movements, and the Muslim contribution in the form of love narratives and lyrics was considerable. Quite often metres, motifs, and assorted rhetorical features of Persian mas̄navīs and ghazals (see below Urdu) were used in a new medium. Moreover, interaction and assimilation took place between the Muslim Ṣūfī traditions, thought, and practices and the Indian bhakti schools. Muslim bhakti poets either expressed Ṣūfī ideas, which were close to monotheistic orthodoxy as well as to the doctrines of Indian saints Kabīr and Nānak, in the Indian dialects through narrative poems modelled on Persian mas̄navīs or chose the path of ecstasy and became devotees of Krishna (which was still close to the more orthodox forms of Ṣūfīsm). None of them followed the devotional style of Tulsīdās, their contemporary and a devotee of Rāma.

It was, however, in Persian and Urdu that Muslim men of letters made the greatest contributions—contributions that led in the former case to the establishment of an “Indian” school of Persian poetry and influenced profoundly the development of poetry in Afghanistan and Tadzhikistan and, in the latter case, led to the emergence of a unique pan-Indian language and literature in Urdu.

Maḥmūd of Ghazna, with whom the chain of Muslim conquests in northern India began, was also the patron of Ferdowsī, one of the greatest of Persian poets. The later conquerors admired literature no less. Since the language of all of them was Persian, the growth of Persian literature in India kept pace with its conquest by the Muslims.

Masʿūd Saʿd Salmān (born 1046 in Lahore), who later became the governor of Jullundhur, was the first noteworthy person of Indian origin to have written poetry in Persian. The first truly great poet was Amīr Khosrow, who wrote in the 13th and 14th centuries. Of Turkish descent, born in the district of Etah in northern India, Khosrow was connected with royal courts all his life, even after 1272, when he became a disciple of the great mystic Niẓām-ud-Dīn Awliyā. He wrote five books of poems, or dīvāns, composed of ghazals (see below Urdu), panegyrics and several mas̄navīs—altogether some 200,000 couplets. In poetry, his innovative spirit displayed itself in waṣf-nigārī—that is, descriptions of natural objects in short poems, which Khosrow incorporated within longer ones. His keenness of observation is also evident in his use of local fauna and flora as poetic images. Khosrow’s distinction lies not so much in the fact that he is an innovator, however, as in the fact that he is equally superb in narrative poetry, panegyrics, and lyrics. The range of his popularity and influence can best be gauged by the fact that, in northern Indian folk literature, one comes across numerous songs and riddles consistently attributed to Amīr Khosrow.

In the centuries that followed Khosrow, until the end of the Islāmic period, India contributed to Persian literature in two ways: first, through the production of dictionaries that helped to standardize the language and consolidate its vocabulary; second, through the development of the so-called Indian style of Persian poetry.

It is generally agreed that this Indian style, sabk-e hindī, did not originate within the geographic confines of India, though it reached its most sublime form there at the hands of poets who either were born in India or spent their most productive years at various Indian courts. Some of the characteristics of the style are (in the words of one modern critic) the emphasis on

parallel statement . . . ; on complex conceit like that of the seventeenth century English “metaphysical” poets, arising out of economy of expression and telescoping into a single image a variety of emotional states; on “cerebral” artifice in pushing familiar images to unfamiliar and unexpected lengths; and on the creation of a syntheticpoetic diction in which a whole phrase constitutes a single image.

The keen observation of daily life that is also characteristic of Indian Persian poetry could have been inspired by the traditions of classical Sanskrit poetry, with which these poets must have been familiar through the extensive translations done during the reign of the Mughals.

The century (1556–1657) of the reigns of Akbar, Jahāngīr, and Shāh Jahān was the most glorious period for Persian poetry in India, though, except for Fayẕī, all of the important poets were immigrants from Persia who found relief from religious and political persecution as well as generous patronage at the hands of the great Mughals and the lesser kings of southern India. The great men of letters of that period were ʿUrfī, Ṭālib Āmulī, Naẓīrī, Ẓuhūrī, Kalīm, and Ṣāʾib.

The greatest poet of the Indian style, however, was ʿAbdul Qādir Bēdil, born in 1644 in Patna, of Uzbek descent. He came early under the influence of the Ṣūfīs, refused to be attached to any court, and travelled widely throughout India during his long life. Bēdil’s 16 books of poetry contain nearly 147,000 verses and include several mas̄navīs. Though ignored by the Iranians, Bēdil’s poetry had an impact on Tadzhik and Uzbek literatures, and its influence is still evident in Afghanistan. A poet of great virtuosity and philosophic bent, he was well acquainted with Indian religions and philosophy. His anti-feudal views and his critical and skeptical attitude toward all kinds of dogma make his poetry relevant even today. His style is difficult, his metaphors and syntax quite complex (though the language itself is quite simple); and yet, as a modern critic puts it, “the intensity of his subjective assessment is so acute and factual, and his metaphysical experience so intense, that genuine poetry emerges in all its splendour.”

Urdu

Earlier varieties of Urdu, variously known as Gujari, Hindawi, and Dakhani, show more affinity with eastern Punjabi and Haryani than with Khari Boli, which provides the grammatical structure of standard modern Urdu. The reasons for putting together the literary products of these dialects, forming a continuous tradition with those in Urdu, are as follows: first, they share a common milieu, consisting of Ṣūfī and Muslim court culture, increasingly dominated by the life and values of the urban elite; second, they display wholesale acceptance of Perso-Arabic literary traditions, including genres, metres, and rhetoric; third, they show an increasing acceptance of Perso-Arabic grammatical devices and vocabulary; and fourth, they tend to prefer Perso-Arabic forms over indigenous forms for learned usage.

Apart from themes and metaphysics, the influence of Ṣūfī hospices and royal courts can be seen in two practices that were essential to the development of Urdu poetry (and also unique to the Urdu milieu in the medieval period) and that still exist in modified forms. First, Urdu poets generally chose an ustād, or master, just as a Ṣūfī novice chose a murshid, or preceptor, and one’s poetic genealogy was always a matter of much pride. Second, poets read poetry in private or semiprivate gatherings, called mushāʿirah, which displayed hierarchies, status consciousness, and rivalries reminiscent of royal courts.

Urdu literature began to develop in the 16th century, in and around the courts of the Quṭb Shāhī and ʿĀdil Shāhī, kings of Golconda and Bījāpur in the Deccan (central India). In the later part of the 17th century, Aurangābād became the centre of Urdu literary activities. There was much movement of the literati and the elite between Delhi and Aurangābād, and it needed only the genius of Walī Aurangābādí, in the early 18th century, to bridge the linguistic gap between Delhi and the Deccan and to persuade the poets of Delhi to take writing in Urdu seriously. In the 18th century, with the migration of poets from Delhi, Lucknow became another important centre of Urdu poetry, though Delhi never lost its prominence.

The first three centuries are dominated by poetry. Urdu prose truly began only in the 19th century, with translations of Persian dāstāns, books prepared at the Delhi College and the Fort William College at Calcutta, and later with the writers of the Aligarh movement.

To focus on essential matters, the discussion that follows forgoes a chronological account of the poetry, concentrating instead on characteristics of particular genres and the achievements of the most significant of their practitioners up to 1857. There is one poet, however, who cannot be described as a practitioner of the classical Perso-Arabic traditions adopted by his fellow poets. Naẓīr Akbarābādī, who wrote in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was a poet of consummate skill who chose to display it in short poems (in various forms) written in the language of popular speech as well as of literature. His themes show similar eclecticism. In his voluminous body of work, there are poems on such diverse topics as popular festivals, the seasons, the vanities of life, erotic pleasures and pursuits, dancing bears, and niggardly merchants. He is a master of the telling detail that immediately brings any event to life. Generally ignored by elitist poets and literary chroniclers of his time, Naẓīr has gained increasing respect and recognition as the first and best poet of the people.

Qasīdahs

Qasīdahs are poems written with a “purpose”—the purpose being worldly gain, in the case of poems praising kings and noblemen, or benefit in the afterworld, in the case of poems praising God, the prophet Muḥammad, and other holy personages. These panegyrics are generally overly long and are written in a highly ornate and hyperbolic style, the poets vying to display their prowess by using as many rhymes and discovering as many associative themes as possible. Because of their style and language they are of special interest to lexicographers. Not much scholarly work has been done on the qasīdahs written in the Deccan, but in northern India a number of poets are regarded highly for their achievements in this genre: in the 18th century, Sawdā and Inshāʾ, and in the 19th, Z̄awq and Ghālib.

Less ornate, if not less elaborate, and more edifying are the ḥaju (derogatory verses, personal and otherwise) and the shahr-āshūb (poems lamenting the decline or destruction of a city). They provide useful information about the mores and morals of the period from the 18th to mid-19th century and truly depict the problems facing the society at large. The poems are not formally restricted to any particular metre or stanza pattern. Sawdā again is one of the more famous names.

Mars̄iyeh means “elegy,” but in Urdu literature it generally means an elegy on the travails of the family and kinsmen of Ḥusayn (grandson of Muḥammad) and their martyrdom in the field of Karbalā, Iraq. These elegies and other lamentatory verses were read at public gatherings, especially during the month of Muḥarram. Although a large number of mars̄iyehs were written in the Deccan and at Delhi, it was in Lucknow, with the patronage of Shīʿite elite and royalty, that mars̄iyehs gained the tenor and magnitude of epic poetry. The two great masters of that 19th-century period were Mīr Anīs and Mīrzā Dabīr, who together established musaddas (a six-line stanza with an aaaa bb rhyme scheme) as the preferred form for mars̄iyehs and added several new topics and details to the ranks of associated themes, thus carrying the form beyond a simple lament. An interesting aspect of these elegies is that, although the scene and personae are Arab, there is no attempt at verisimilitude: Arab gallants and maidens speak and gesture like the elites of Lucknow. Perhaps this added to the pathos and effectiveness of the poems at public readings.

Mas̄navī was the preferred genre for all descriptive and narrative purposes, for it allows the most freedom (only the lines of each couplet must rhyme). In the Deccan, all major poets wrote at least one long mas̄navī, but lack of knowledge of the dialect has prevented their full appreciation. Thus, the more famous mas̄navīs are by later poets of Delhi and Lucknow, such as Mīr, Mīr Ḥasan, Dayā Shankar Nasīm, and Mīrzā Shawq. The topics of descriptive mas̄navīs range from mundane events of life, hunting trips of kings, and the vagaries of nature’s seasons to autobiographical discourses. Narrative mas̄navīs are considerably longer, running into hundreds of couplets. In the Deccan several poets wrote abridged versions of Persian mas̄navīs, but many others wrote original compositions utilizing Indian romances as well as the better known Persian and Arabic ones. Apart from the names of the protagonists in the mas̄navīs inspired by Persian and Arabic poems, all else is always local; the landscape, cityscape, processions, customs and rituals, social values and taboos, even the physical characteristics of the people are totally Indian, though dominantly Muslim and feudal. Despite their length, these narratives gained much popularity and, at least in northern India, were often read in public places, in much the same way as storytellers told stories. The mas̄navī form was also used by some of the Hindi Ṣūfī poets.

For the most part, the history of Urdu poetry in India is the story of Urdu ghazal, which has been the favourite of both poets and their audiences in every period. A short lyric, with prosodic requirements of both metre and rhyme, ghazal demands great skill and thought from the poet, for its couplet must be a complete semantic entity and fully express a whole, well-integrated poetic experience. Favourite themes are erotic love, Ṣūfī love, and metaphysics. Naturally, Urdu poets began by closely imitating, often even plagiarizing, Persian masters, but later on they spoke in a more authentic voice. They continued, however, to employ a vocabulary of love that owed almost everything to Persian and shared very little with the traditions of lyrical poetry in other Indian languages. For example, with few exceptions, the lover is always masculine; expression of love is never made by a woman. Unique, too, is the use of masculine grammatical forms and imagery for the beloved, even when, in every other way, the poem is clearly celebrating heterosexual love. This peculiarity, as well as other traditions borrowed from Persian masters, gives a ghazal couplet a tremendously wide range of interpretations. It is amazing indeed what a master poet can condense into one terse couplet.

The two greatest ghazal writers in Urdu are Mīr Taqī Mīr, in the 18th century, and Mīrzā Asadullāh Khān Ghālib, in the 19th. They are in some ways diametrical opposites. The first prefers either very long metres or very short, employs a simple, non-Persianized language, and restricts himself to affairs of the heart. The other writes in metres of moderate length, uses a highly Persianized vocabulary, and ranges wide in ideas. Mīr speaks of passion and pathos; Ghālib betrays a skeptic’s mind and leaves nothing unquestioned, not even his feelings. But both have left indelible marks on the ideas and emotions of succeeding generations. Ghālib wrote poetry in Persian as well as Urdu and also published a couple of volumes of letters in Urdu that helped usher in modern prose. In many ways he bridges the gap separating the medieval sensibility from the modern. The contemporary mind, however, is also moved by the authentic passion of Mīr, idolizing him for the sublimity of his concept of love and for his personal integrity. The poems of Ghālib and Mīr represent the best of the Urdu ghazal; and the Urdu ghazal, as an anonymous wit has remarked, is the Muslims’ greatest gift to India, after the Tāj Mahal.

The island nation of Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka), formally a part of South Asia, has been little noticed by the subcontinent, apart from the fact that according to an uncertain tradition it is celebrated in the Rāmāyaṇa as the island called Laṅǐā. Buddhist sway was introduced there early, during the reign of Aśoka Maurya (c. 269–232 bc); and, while on the subcontinent Buddhism prospered, declined, and finally disappeared, in Ceylon it has continued until today. Although there are obvious borrowings in Ceylon from subcontinental literature, notably Sanskrit, and there was rather precarious communication with India through the island’s Hindu community of Tamils, Ceylon never became culturally continuous with the mainland. The language itself, although of Indo-Aryan stock, is strongly mixed with a substratum of Dravidian. Also, it was Ceylon’s fate early to fall victim to European colonialism, first to the Portuguese, then to the Dutch, and finally to the British, before it regained nationhood in 1948.

While there are inscriptions that antedate the Christian Era, no texts appear to survive from before the 10th century ad. The first texts that emerged were aids in Sinhalese—glossaries, paraphrases, and the like—to the study of the Pāli texts of Buddhism. More interesting are Sinhalese renderings of the life and virtues of the Buddha. Important in this genre, hagiographic rather than literary, is the Amāvatura (“Flood of the Ambrosia”), by Guruḷugōmī, which in 18 chapters purports to narrate the life of the Buddha, with specific emphasis on one of his nine virtues—his capacity to tame recalcitrant people or forces. In a similar vein is the literature of devotion and counsel, in which Buddhist virtues are celebrated.

Exceptional in the context of the South Asian subcontinent is the early and persistent interest in historical records. Such interest had begun in Pāli with the Dīpavaṃsa (“Chronicle of the Island”) and had continued with the Mahāvaṃsa (“Great Chronicle”) and Cūlavaṃsa (“Lesser Chronicle”), but it had a life of its own in Sinhalese. The most important, and possibly the oldest, of such chronicles is the Thūpavaṃsaya (“Chronicle of the Great Stupa”), by Pārakrama Paṇḍita. Subsequent chronicles, or genealogies of places, comprise the history of all of the major Buddhist monuments. Several chronicles were also inspired by the Tooth Relic, received from Kaliṅga in the 4th century by King Kīrtiśrīmēghavarṇa. Such chronicling included that of the kings who protected the relic.

All of this literature was mostly in prose, but poetry as a literary form no doubt antedated it, as evidenced by early inscriptions. Much poetry was occasioned by Pāli Jātakas (stories of the Buddha’s previous births) and other Buddhist stories, though Hindu stories were not lacking; for example, a version of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata (received through a Tamil source) was cast in the style of a Jātaka in the Mahāpadaraṅga-Jatakaya.

Likewise of Hindu Indian origin was a genre that took off from the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa’s “Meghadūta” (see above Classical Sanskrit kāvya [200–1200]), in which an exiled lover sends a message to his beloved by way of a monsoon cloud, thus giving the poet the opportunity to dwell on the description of landmarks in a poetic travelogue. This genre, so-called saṃdeśa literature, by no means unknown on the mainland, proliferated widely on Ceylon.

Of a different style are panegyrics and war poems, the earliest of which is the Parakumbasirita (“History of Parakramabahu VI,” king in Jayavardhanapura from 1410 to 1468). Again reminiscent of the mainland and the religious tradition are the plentiful eulogies of the Buddha. Popular, too, was didactic verse, among the most notable of which is the Kusajātaka, 687 stanzas of epigrams and exempla by the 17th-century poet Alagiyavanna Mohoṭṭāla.

Modern period: 19th and 20th centuries

The modern period was ushered in by the arrival of the British, the influence of Western models becoming discernible in the early 19th century. Reform-minded Hindus, led by Ram Mohun Roy, took a positive attitude to Western literature and urged on their countrymen a Western type of education. Newly formed literary clubs spread the influence of predominantly British works, thereby opening the Indian educated elite to Western culture and literature in general. After a period of translation, authors sought to imitate Western models and eventually to be independently creative in the new styles.

The most striking result of Westernization was the introduction of prose on a major scale. Vernacular prose, rarely looked upon previously as a medium for art, was now used as a literary vehicle, and such hitherto unknown forms as the novel, novella, and short story began to emerge. In poetry the thrall of tradition was stronger, and verse in the older forms continued to be written. With modernity, realism appeared, as well as symbolism in some quarters, and there was new psychological and social interest.

From Bengal spread a new sense of national purpose, which became the principal motivation for much English as well as vernacular literature. Three trends can be distinguished in the products of this increasing literary activity. The old traditionalism was transformed into romanticism, which looked to the past, to Indian history, for inspiration and sought to preserve what was considered valuable in the past; a tendency to mysticism went hand in hand with the romantic mood (a mood that was also widespread in 19th-century Europe). Greater social awareness in European literature was reflected in the literature of Indian progressives, in whose works a somewhat romantic Marxism prevailed. Finally, there was a humanistic trend. The teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, combining social concerns with traditional ethics, later exerted a very great influence on literature.

In the years preceding and following India’s independence (1947) and control of the princely states, the fervour of writers sometimes turned to an increasingly articulate progressivism of various Marxist schools, sometimes to disappointment and bitterness, and most recently, it appears, to a mood of introspection. These developments, which occurred with a different pace in different regions, are described briefly below. A complete coverage of the most modern literature has not been attempted, but an endeavour has been made to mention persons who are considered to be representative.

Except for the iconoclastic poet Michael Madhusudan Datta, poetic activity in the mid-19th century was giving ground to experimentation with the new prose style learned from English. During this period, Bengali literature produced a spate of novels—satiric, social, and picaresque. While Michael’s work Mēghanādavadh (1861; a long poem on the Rāma theme in which Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa become the villains and Rāvaṇa the hero) caused a stir, the literary event of the period was the appearance on the scene of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, whose first novel, Durgeśanandinī (“Daughter of the Lord of the Fort”), appeared in 1865. While not at first overtly nationalist, Bankim Chandra became more and more an apologist for the Hindu position. In Kṛsṇacaritra, Christ suffers in comparison with Krishna, and in his best known work, Ānanda-maṭh (1892; “The Abbey of Bliss”), the motherland in the person of the goddess Durgā is extolled.

Perhaps first among novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is Saratchandra Chatterjee, whose social concerns with the family and other homely issues made his work popular. But the early 20th century is certainly best known for the poet who towers head and shoulders above the rest, Rabindranath Tagore. Poet, playwright, novelist, painter, essayist, musician, social reformer, Rabindranath produced works, still not completely collected, that fill 26 substantial volumes. The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, primarily for his little book of songs called GītāŃjali, which was much praised by Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, Tagore is more known for these devotional poems than for the wit and clear thought with which his later work is filled. He was the last of an era, looking back as he did to the religious and political history of Bengal for his inspiration. Those who followed him were more concerned with introspection and dramatic imagery.

If Tagore was the last poet in the Bengali tradition, Jibanananda Das was the first of a new breed. Musing and melancholy, yet known for vivid and unusual imagery Jibananada is a poet who has much influence on younger writers in Bengal. There have been many other poets in the 20th century who are equally powerful but stand somewhat apart from the mainstream. One of these was Sudhindranath Datta, a poet much like Pound in careful and etymological use of language; another is the poet and prose writer Buddhadeva Bose.

Bose has been termed a progressive, and indeed he consciously turned away from the tradition orientation of Tagore and sought inspiration in schools foreign to Bengal—for example, the French Symbolists. He is the leader of an artistic faction, the Kallol school, and editor of an influential literary magazine, Kavitā. Unjustifiably called obscene, his writing has been experimental, probing into social and psychological realities of Bengali life.

While there have been, and still are, literary factions associated with political positions, they have been less definitive than some in other parts of India. Bengali writers in the 20th century have tended to be personal and individual rather than propagandist for political positions.

Assamese literature began with Hemchandra Baruwa, a satirist and playwright, author of the play Bahiri-Rang-Chang Bhitare Kowabhaturi (1861; “All That Glitters Is Not Gold”). The most outstanding among the early modern writers was Lakshminath Bezbaruwa, who founded a literary monthly, Jōnāki (“Moonlight”), in 1889, and was responsible for infusing Assamese letters with 19th-century Romanticism. Later 20th-century writers have tried to remain faithful to the ideals of Jōnāki. The short story in particular has flourished in the language; notable practitioners are Mahichandra Bora and Holiram Deka.

The year 1940 marked a shift toward psychology, but World War II effectively put an end to literary development. When writers resumed after the war, there was a clear break with the past, in experimental verse and the growth of the novel form.

Modern Hindi literature began with Harishchandra in poetry and drama, Mahavir Prasad Dvivedi in criticism and other prose writings, and Prem Chand in fiction. This period, the second half of the 19th century, saw mainly translations from Sanskrit, Bengali, and English. The growth of nationalism and social reform movements of the Arya Samaj led to the composition of long narrative poems, exemplified by those of Maithili Sharan Gupta; dramas, by those of Jayashankar Prasad; and historical novels, by those of Prasad, Chatureen Shastri, and Vrindavan Lal Varma. The novels drew mainly on the periods of the Maurya, Gupta, and Mughal empires.

This period was followed by the Non-cooperation and satyāgraha movements of Mahatma Gandhi, which inspired poets such as Makhan Lal Chaturvedi, Gupta, and Subhadra Chauhan and novelists such as Prem Chand and Jainendra Kumar. Eventual disillusionment with Gandhian experiments and the increasing influence of Marxism on European literature influenced writers such as Yashpal, Rangeya Raghava, and Nagarjuna.

S.N. Pant, Prasad, Nirala, and Mahadevi Varma, the most creative poets of the 1930s, drew inspiration from the Romantic tradition in English and Bengali poetry and the mystic tradition of medieval Hindi poetry. Reacting against them were the Marxist poets Ram Vilas Sharma and Nagarjuna and experimentalists such as H.S. Vatsyayan “Agyeya” and Bharat Bhuti Agarwal. Nirala, who developed from a mystic-romantic into a realist and experimentalist, was the most outstanding poet of the 1950s; and Sarweshwar Dayal Saxena, Kailash Vajpeyi, and Raghubir Sahay were the most creative poets of the 1960s.

Two trends, represented by the work of Prem Chand and Jainendra Kumar, led Hindi fiction in two different directions: while social realists like Yashpal, Upendranath Ashk, Amritlal Nagar, Mohan Rakesh, Rajendra Yadav, Kamleshwar, Nagarjuna, and Renu faithfully analyzed the changing patterns of Indian society, writers such as Ila Chandra Joshi, “Agyeya,” Dharm Vir Bharati, and Shrikant Varma explored the psychology of the individual, not necessarily within the Indian context.

Among the dramatists of the 1930s and 1940s were Govind Ballabh Pant and Seth Govind Das; because of their highly Sanskritized language, their plays have had a limited audience. Plays by minor writers such as Ramesh Mehta, however, are repeatedly staged by professional theatres. In between these extremes there are some notable playwrights.

In Gujarāt, too, the advent of British rule deeply influenced the literary scene. The year 1886 saw the Kusumamālā (“Garland of Flowers”), a collection of lyrics by Narsingh Rao. Other poets include Kalapi, Kant, and especially Nanalal, who experimented in free verse and was the first poet to eulogize Gandhi. Gandhi, himself a Gujarati, admonished poets to write for the masses and thus inaugurated a period of poetic concern with changes in the social order. Many incidents in Gandhi’s life inspired the songs of poets. The Gandhi period in Gujarāt as elsewhere gave way to a period of progressivism in the class-conflict poetry of R.L. Meghani and Bhogilal Gandhi. In post-independence India, poetry has tended to become subjectivist and alienated without, however, fully superseding the traditional verse of devotion to God and love of nature.

Among novelists, Govardhanram stands out; his Sarasvatīchandra is a classic, the first social novel. In the novel form, too, the influence of Gandhiism is clearly felt, though not in the person of Kanaiyalal Munshi, who was critical of Gandhian ideology but still, in several Purāṇa-inspired works, tended to preach much the same message. In the period after independence the modernists embraced existentialistic, surrealistic, and symbolistic trends and gave voice to the same kind of alienation as the poets.

The modern period in Marathi poetry began with Kesavasut and was influenced by 19th-century British Romanticism and liberalism, European nationalism, and the greatness of the history of Mahārāshtra. Kesavasut declared a revolt against traditional Marathi poetry and started a school, lasting until 1920, that emphasized home and nature, the glorious past, and pure lyricism. After that, the period was dominated by a group of poets called the Ravikiraṇ Maṇḍal, who proclaimed that poetry was not for the erudite and sensitive but was instead a part of everyday life. Contemporary poetry, after 1945, seeks to explore man and his life in all its variety; it is subjective and personal and tries to speak colloquially.

Among modern dramatists, S.K. Kolhatkar and R.G. Gadkari are notable. Realism was first brought to the stage in the 20th century, by Mama Varerkar, who tried to interpret many social problems.

The Madhalī Sthiti (1885; “Middle State”), of Hari Narayan Apte, began the novel tradition in Marathi; the work’s message was one of social reform. A high place is held by V.M. Joshi, who explored the education and evolution of a woman (Suśīlā-cha Diva, 1930) and the relation between art and morals (Indu Kāḷe va Saralā Bhoḷe, 1935). Important after 1925 were N.S. Phadke, who advocated art for art’s sake, and V.S. Khandehar, who countered the former with an idealistic art for life’s sake. Noteworthy contemporary novelists are S.N. Pendse, V.V. Shirwadkar, G.N. Dandekar, and Ranjit Desai.

Modern Punjabi literature began around 1860. A number of trends in modern poetry can be discerned. To the more traditional genres of narrative poetry, mystic verse, and love poems was added nationalist poetry in a humorous or satiric mood and experimental verse. Among the more important Punjabi poets are Bhai Vir Singh, in the 19th century, and Purana Singh, Amrita Pritam, and Baba Balwanta, in the 20th century.

Modern prose is represented by Bhai Vira Singha, Charana Singha, and Nanaka Singha, all of whom wrote novels; the same writers, as well as Gurbhaksh Singh and Devendra Satyarathi, also wrote short stories. Among playwrights mention may be made of I.C. Nanda, Harcharan Singh, and Santa Singh Sekhon.

Rajasthani

It is generally agreed that modern Rajasthani literature began with the works of Suryamal Misrama. His most important works are the Vamsa Bhaskara and the Vira satsaī. The Vamsa Bhaskara contains accounts of the Rājput princes who ruled in what was then Rājputāna (at present the state of Rājasthān), during the lifetime of the poet (1872–1952). The Vira satsaī is a collection of couplets dealing with historical heroes. Two other important poets in this traditional style are Bakhtavara Ji and Kaviraja Muraridana.

The period of nationalist strife against the British inspired a number of poets to verse that was both nationalist and in the traditional heroic vein; among them are Hiralala Sastri, Manikyalala Varma, and Jayanarayana Vyasa. This period was followed by one in which progressive social ideals inspired such poets as Ganeshilala Vyasa, Murlidhara Vyasa, and Satyaprakasha Jodhi.

Primarily known for their lyrics are Kanhaya Lal Sethiya and Megharaja Mukula, among others, and known for their narrative poems are Manohara Sharma, Shrimanta Kumara, and Naraina Singha Bhati.

Modern prose is represented in the novel, short story, and play. Among the novelists are Shiva Candra Bharatiya, Shri Lal Jodhi, Vijaya Dana Detha, and Yadavendra Sharma Chandra; the short-story writers are Rani Lakshmi Kumari Chandavata, Narasingh Rajapurohita, Dinadayala Ojha, and Purushottama Lala Menariya. Vijaya Dana Detha and Rani Lakshmi Kumari Chandavata are also known for their retelling of Rajasthani folktales. Among the playwrights is Shivachandra Bharatiya.

In the second half of the 19th century two tendencies were present in Tamil literature. One was the old traditional prose style of the Patiṉeṇ-kīḻkkaṇakku, or “Eighteen Ethical Works” (see above Dravidian literature: 1st–19th century), learned and severely scholastic; among others, V.V. Svaminatha Iyer and Arumuga Navalar wrote in this style. Another tendency, begun by Aruṇācala Kavirāyar in the 18th century, sought to bring the spoken and written languages together. This tendency developed on one side into such works as the operatic play Nantaṉār Carittarak Kīrttaṉai by Gopalakrishna, and on the other into ballads, often based on the lore of the Sanskrit Purāṇas. Despite attempts to effect a synthesis between the two languages, however, the scholastic style has continued to have a profound influence on modern Tamil literature; the normal spoken language, in fact, never became a literary medium.

The first novel in Tamil appeared in 1879, the Piratāpamutaliyār Carittiram, by Vetanayakam Pillai, who was inspired by English and French novels. In important respects Pillai’s work is typical of all early modern Tamil fiction: his subject matter is Tamil life as he observed it, the language is scholastic, and the inspiration comes from foreign sources. Not strictly a novel, his work, which has a predominantly moral tone, is a loosely gathered string of narratives centred around an innocent hero.

Quite different is the Kamalāmpāḷ Carittiram (“The Fatal Rumor”), by Rajam Aiyar, whom many judge to be the most important prose writer of 19th-century Tamil literature. In this work, the author created a series of characters that appear to have become classics; the story is a romance, yet life in rural Tamil country is treated very realistically, with humour, irony, and social satire. In language Aiyar follows the classical style, which he intermixes with informal conversation, a style that has been imitated by modern authors.

The turn of the century saw the development of the centamiḻ style, which in many respects is a continuation of the medieval commentatorial style. The best representative is V.V. Swaminathan, who also is responsible for the rediscovery of the Tamil classical legacy, usually called “Tamil Renaissance,” which tended to direct the mood of writers back to the glorious past. The pride in Tamil subsequently gave rise to a purist tradition and a second style, called tuyattamiḻ, or “pure Tamil.” With exaggerated Tamilian self-consciousness, the language was purged of all non-Tamil loanwords, particularly Sanskrit, which removed the literary language even further from the spoken one. This style was not ineffective in verse but led easily to rhetoric.

The scholastic and formalist character of Tamil prose was predominant in the literature until the advent, in the early 20th century, of the poet and prose writer Subrahmanya Bharati. Bharati sought to synthesize the popular and the scholastic traditions of Tamil literature, and he created thereby a Tamil that was amenable to all literary expression. This synthesis, however, did not extend to the literary language itself, which in grammar continued the formal language, though for syntax, vocabulary, etc., he drew upon colloquial speech. In doing so he saved the language from the Sanskrit tradition of Purāṇa writing. His style is the maṟumaḷarcci naṭai, the “renaissance style.”

In the first half of the 20th century, R. Krishnamurthy was an immensely popular writer. Under the pseudonym Kalki, he was an influential journalist who wrote voluminous historical romances.

In the 1930s there was a literary movement inspired by a journal called Manikkoti. Writers in this movement contributed extremely important new works, both in verse and prose, to Tamil letters. Among them was Putumaippittan, who wrote realistically, critically, and even bitterly about the failings of society.

Contemporary literature is represented by T. Janakiraman, who writes novels, short stories, and plays with themes from urban Tamil middle-class family life; Jayakanthan, a sharp and passionate writer, with a tendency to shock his readers; and L.S. Ramatirthan, probably the finest stylist at work in Tamil today, who started by writing in English.

Malayalam

In Malayalam the modern movement began in the late 19th century with Asan, who was temperamentally a pessimist—a disposition reinforced by his metaphysics—yet all his life was active in promoting his downtrodden Ezhava community. Ullor wrote in the classical tradition, on the basis of which he appealed for universal love, while Vallathol (died 1958) responded to the human significance of social progress.

Contemporary poetry records the encounter with problems of social, political, and economic life. The tendency is toward political radicalism.

Drama, native in Malayalam tradition, emerged in the modern period as farce, comedy, and satire but turned in the 1920s to a more sombre appraisal of outdated social conventions. The novel dates back to the late 1880s and was early concerned with social realism. At present the general tendency is introspective.

Modern Kannada poetry emerged about the beginning of the 20th century and showed a spirit of national purpose that pervaded other literature as well. By 1920, after major translations from Western models had been published, new literary forms such as the lyric and the short story came to the fore in the works of Panje Mangesh Rao and B.M. Srikantiah. Other prominent Kannada writers were D.V.G. Masti, Govinda Pai, and K.V. Puttappa (“Kuvempu”). In recent years a modernist movement has influenced the literature.

The modern period in Urdu literature coincides with the mid-19th-century emergence of a middle class that saw in Western thought and science a means to needed social reform. Naẓīr Aḥmad wrote novels about the conflicts of Muslim middle class people. Shiblī, a poet and critic, wrote on the lives of great Muslims. The more famous novelists of the later period are Ratan-Nāth Sharshār, ʿAbd-ul-Ḥalīm Sharar, and Mīrzā Ruswā. The fathers of modern Urdu poetry were Ḥālī and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Āzād, the latter particularly characterized by a fine sensitivity for the past.

The greatest modern poet is Iqbāl. Writing in the early 20th century, he was influenced by the general sense of national purpose and the freedom movement. His poetic imagery, the power of his expression, and his philosophical outlook won the admiration of his fellow Muslims. In prose the most important writer of short stories was Prem Chand, who late in his career took to writing in Hindi. The 1930s saw the influence of progressivism, which attempted to make literature an arm of social revolution. Among the representative writers of this period are Sajjad Zahir, Upendranath Ashk, and Ismat Chughtai, the last a woman who is considered among the best.

There has been Indian literary activity in English for the last 200 years. It began with the insistence of the reformist Rammohan Ray and other like-minded Hindus that, for India to take its rightful place among nations, a knowledge of and education in English were essential. English literary activity took on a new aspect with the independence movement, whose leaders and followers found in English the one language that united them.

Among the first poets were Henry Derozio, Kashiprasad Ghose, and Michael Madhusudan Datta, all of whom wrote narrative verse. In the following generation there was Toru Dutt, important among women poets in this genre. Carrying on her work was Sarojini Naidu, judged by many the greatest of women poets; among her writings are The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912), and The Broken Wing (1917). Best known of the Indian poets in English was the Bengali Rabindranath Tagore (see above Bengali), who, however, wrote most of his verse first in Bengali, and then translated it. A very different figure from Tagore is Sri Aurobindo, who started out as an ardent nationalist and was jailed by the British. After his conversion from activism to introspection, which took place in jail, he established a hermitage in Pondicherry. He left behind a rich oeuvre of verse that has inspired a contemporary school of mystic poets. Other modern poets show the influence of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

The independence movement gave strong impetus to expository prose. Important contributors to this genre were Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who edited the English journal Mahratta, Lala Lajpat Rai, Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, and T. Prakasam. Mahatma Gandhi, too, wrote widely in English and edited Young India and the Harijan. He also wrote the autobiography My Experiments with Truth (originally published in Gujarati, 1927–29), now an Indian classic. In this he was followed by Jawaharlal Nehru, whose Discovery of India is justly popular.

Prose fiction in English began in 1902 with the novel The Lake of Palms, by Romesh Chunder Dutt. The next important novelist is Mulk Raj Anand, who fulminated against class and caste distinction in a series of novels, The Coolie (1936), Untouchable (1935), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), and The Big Heart (1945). Less fierce, though a better craftsman, is R.K. Narayan, who has published nine novels (as well as many short stories), among them The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), and The Vendor of Sweets (1967); his work has a wider circle of readers outside India than within. Other Indian novelists in the English medium are Santha Rama Rau, Manohar Malgonkar, Kamala Markandeya, and Khushwant Singh. The most popular is Raja Rao, whose novels Kanthapura (1938), The Cow of the Barricades (1947), and The Serpent and the Rope have attracted a wide following.

Traditional contemporary poetry continues to be Buddhist in subject matter and sentiment. A more modern literature arose under the influence of Western models; notable among the contemporary representatives of Sinhalese literature are Kumaranatunga, a critic, Matin Wickremasinghe, a novelist, and Tennakoon, a poet.